• "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement
• we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.
• One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools
• But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system
• "I feel overwhelmed, underappreciated and underpaid," a teacher told me one morning at one of the Success Charter Network schools in Harlem.
• "I work from 7:30 to 5:30 in the building and then go home and work some more," the teacher told me. "I get disrespectful pushback from parents all the time when I try to give their kids consequences. I get feedback from my [supervisors], who demand that I change five or six things by the next day. I think we are doing a great job, so I keep at it. But there is no way I can do this beyond another year or two."
• One of the assistant principals was Jessica Reid, whom I had been following for more than a year. Ms. Reid had pushed her students forward so successfully that Ms. Moskowitz had promoted her in the fall of 2010, when she was, indeed, just 28.
• In January I met with Ms. Reid to talk about burnout, among other issues. She quickly volunteered, "I know I can't do this forever. And I know if I had a child I couldn't do it. As it is, it is screwing up my marriage."

• I learned that Ms. Reid had resigned from the Harlem Success school over the weekend.

   

  When I spoke to her a month later, she used the word "sustainable" a dozen times in explaining her sudden decision to me—as in, "This wasn't a sustainable life, in terms of my health and my marriage."
• just as having superstar doctors in the emergency room is no substitute for fixing our health-care system, in the long struggle to improve American schools, these exemplary educators will lead us to the right place only if we can figure out a realistic way to motivate and enable the less-than-extraordinary teachers in the rank and file
• teachers' unions have to be enlisted in the fight for reform. The unions are the organizational link that will enable school improvement to expand beyond the ability of extraordinary people to work extraordinary hours.
• cannot be done charter by charter; it takes the infrastructure of the public school system
• If there is anything that I have learned from trying to figure out the problems of American public education, it's not just that teachers are toxic when they hang on for 20 or 30 years caring only about their tenure and their pensions. It's also that teachers get far better at what they do when they've been doing it for a few years. Working long, hard hours helps.
• preparation, training, lots of feedback and introspection, and high expectations to turn a hard worker into a great teacher. A handful may have the necessary skills and charisma on their first day in class. Most don't. It's a building process, and it requires time.
• Superstar teachers and great charter schools are saving thousands of young lives. But reaching into every American classroom means working with the union

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• e main structures of U.S. public education date to the 19th Century, when individual towns paid essentially all the costs of operating whatever schools they had, and to the progressive era, when it was deemed important to “keep education out of politics”
• Better to entrust its supervision to expert professionals and to independent, nonpartisan school boards that would surely attract the community’s leaders to tend this crucial civic function.
• These early state boards, and almost all of those that followed (nearly every state now has one), were intended to be at least one step removed if not entirely divorced from messy electoral politics.
• as the decades have passed, “local” has gradually become a less accurate way to describe, much less to organize, public education in America. Most school funding now comes from state and federal sources
• regulation
• mobile society
• new realities raise some interesting questions: why is 6th grade math in Portland, Maine different from that in Portland, Oregon?
• dream of keeping education out of politics has turned into a nightmare
• in far too many places, today’s school boards consist of an unwholesome mix of aspiring politicians, teacher union puppets, individuals with some cause or scheme they yearn to inflict on everyone’s kids, and ex-employees of the system with scores to settle
• same thing happens at the state level, often with an additional dose of partisan politics
• It is also folly to wall education off from juvenile justice, health care, social services, employment services and the rest. Kids are not compartmentalized. It should be easy to coordinate what they need to grow up well—or at least to coordinate the portions for which government is responsible.
• Fourth, our inherited structures presuppose a quasi-monopoly over K-12 education—”one best system” that delivers essentially the same instructional package to every child in every neighborhood and that takes little account of individual differences or preferences
• Wealthy families have always been able to buy their way out of that system via private schools
• Today, however, school choice in a dozen forms has proliferated
• All sorts of improvisations and work-arounds have been devised to compensate for the blunt fact that the system itself is hostile to educational diversity, competition, and choice. As the system continues to push back against these alternatives, it constrains, weakens, or defeats them. Nobody benefits except, maybe, the old system.
• educators
• What would we want from a changed system? School-level autonomy is essential
• Diversity and choice among schools is crucial, because kids differ, competition is productive, and monopolies are not.
• innovators who welcome responsibility
• Voluntary school networks, not necessarily geographically based, will often prove more efficient and do better quality-control than thousands of isolated organizations.
• Nor should individual schools have to invent everything from scratch or buy it in small batches
• join with others in acquiring food services, transportation, health insurance, speech therapists, and such
• free to individualize instruction (and boost curricular quality and diversity while saving money) by providing instruction via technology.
• states would wield most of the authority and provide most of the money, but those dollars would follow kids to the schools of their choice, which would largely run themselves, selecting their staffs, managing their budgets, etc.
• Academic standards in core subjects would be the same across the land, as would tests and other gauges of performance.
• Every school’s performance would be open for public inspection, as would its financial records and its staff’s qualifications and track record.
• Failed schools would lose their license to operate.
• If people are not satisfied with their schools or their results, they would have three main options: move their kids to different schools, move their families to a different state, or elect a different governor.
• Dream or pipe-dream, that’s the short version of a better way to organize American education in the 21st century. You may think it could never happen and you might be right. But we could get closer by passing, changing, or repealing a handful of laws.
• Over the last 20 years, England didn’t abolish its “local education authorities”—Blighty’s version of school districts—but it conferred so much autonomy on individual schools and their boards of governors that it essentially marginalized those authorities.

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• Why Won't 'Reformers' Listen?

   

         By Diane Ravitch
• state Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Deborah Gist
• Teachers in Rhode Island are angry and disheartened in the aftermath of the pink slips that went out to every teacher in the Providence schools. But no one other than teachers seems to know or care.
• My view: indiscriminate, mass layoffs—with no individual evaluations—demoralize everyone and sunder the bonds of trust that are so necessary for school improvement.
• I worry about the one-sided treatment of education issues, not only in Rhode Island, but in the national media. The corporate reformers seem shocked when anyone questions their narrative
• They see no downside to their dogmatic belief in closing schools and firing principals and teachers, nor to their dogmatic faith that higher test scores are the goal of education.

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• Here's Why They Don't Listen

   

         By Deborah Meier
• They are 100 percent convinced that market competition is always the best
• see the great advantage of using the moment to destroy the one and only organized body contesting over the "proper" distribution of wages and profits—the American trade unions
• need to divert attention from the faults of Wall Street et al and insist that schools are the source of all that goes wrong
• those who have a financial stake in this project
• those who are so accustomed to "seeing like a state" that they use their fine educations to make grand plans for refashioning the lives of others
• there's something else, too
• nine panelists
• here were four young school people: a charter school founder from KIPP and several others preparing for careers "reforming" public schooling; plus, Sonia Nieto, Bill Ayers, and Harold Levy. (Levy was the New York City schools chancellor before Joel Klein.
• turned into a love fest—mostly—of critiques of the current so-called reform "consensus."
• a wealthy supporter of the current wave of reforms and I got into a tiff of the sort we probably both try to avoid
• his telling me that he funds and directs school turn-arounds. A turn-around school was one in which you first fire everyone who works there, he explained, with zest and enthusiasm.
• He was surprised that I recoiled from his words with an expression of horror. How can you enjoy what you've done to the people who work in that place, I asked?
• He said he got his pleasure in doing right by children. Why are you so sure the children will do better with different adults, I probed?
• essentially told me he considered the former teachers worthless human beings, products of low-status state schools, the dregs.
• replaced with higher-caliber humans—products of our top universities—scores naturally will go up.
• passionate certainty

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• Alexis de Tocqueville is famous for his portrait of 19th-century America and his philosophic insights on why the American society has flourished — and also where it might go wrong.
• In essence, Tocqueville believed that the civic health of America depended on popular participation in entities like associations to create and maintain religious, private, or charter schools, as well as in local authorities like school districts with fully-empowered schools boards.
• activity fosters civic virtue and “habits of the heart” and encourages everyday citizens to take on necessary social tasks that in pre-modern society lowly subjects were not allowed to undertake, but were instead the duty of the aristocracy.
• Tocqueville liked voluntary associations and local government for the same reason. They are venues where Americans can get together with their “enormous and constructive popular energy” to undertake projects and shape their own destinies
• people still have a romantic, out-dated image of school districts and local boards. Today, they are not the school committees that Tocqueville saw
• new promising avenue for popular participation is Parent Trigger, whereby parents can petition to turn a regular public school into a charter school.
• perils of “centralization of information”
• Under these centralized conditions, opinion does not develop freely, but is “hierarchically formed”
• Yet for public schools, President Obama is doing precisely what Tocqueville warned against.
• “Any set of test questions that the federal government prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a national curriculum. … [Carried to its full extent,] national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.”
• This policy is Tocqueville’s nightmare: As in Europe, education “has become a national affair” and President Obama is imposing in America a one-size-fits-all centralization like that administered by the National Ministry of Education in France.

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• Since I am a historian, I don't think I am the right person to tell teachers how to teach or tell principals how to run their schools. I leave that to you, since you spent so many years as both teacher and principal.
• I would argue, however, that there is value in warning policymakers when they are imposing harmful ideas on children, schools, and educators.
• National Research Council of the National Academies of Science just released a major report about the value of test-based accountability and incentives.
• "how incentives affect behavior and to consider the implications of that research for educational accountability systems that attach incentives to test results."
• 17-member committee consisted of a stellar cast of experts from the social and behavioral sciences
• conclusions do not support our nation's current emphasis on test-based accountability
• "Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest-achieving countries.
• second major conclusion of the report is that high school exit examinations, as currently implemented in the United States, "decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement."
• "That's one of the worst ideas out there. ... In the process of creating No Child Left Behind, as people thought about these strategies and rewards, they actually undermined teachers' motivations. They got teachers to care less, rather than more ... [because] they took away a sense of personal achievement and autonomy."
• Marc S. Tucker, writing for the National Center on Education and the Economy,
• much of the current reform agenda in this country is irrelevant, a detour from the route we must follow if we are to match the performance of the best.
• do not test every student every year; they do not judge teacher quality by student test scores; they do not rely on computer-scored tests;
• have a national curriculum that goes "far beyond mathematics and the home language covering,
• coherent process for recruiting, educating, and supporting excellent teachers who make teaching their career

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• The best schools — whether they're charter schools, public schools or private schools — are intentional about everything they do, says educational analyst Andrew Rotherham.
• who is in the building, who is teaching, how they use data, what's happening for students, the support for students, the curriculum, how progress is assessed
• Rotherham explains why he supports strategies that will redesign American public education with the help of charter schools, public sector choices and teacher accountability.
• Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income student
• Rotherham cites several character schools he'd like to see used as models around the country, including The Match School in Boston, which focuses on getting kids into college, and the Knowledge Is Power Program
• "But more than anything else, what I would like to see replicated is that sense of possibility
• intentional about making sure the kids who come to the school with the least are getting the most
• they're getting the most effective teachers, they're getting a rich, high-quality curriculum [and] they are supported in school.
• On educational testing
• hat you see is a lot of anxiety about the test, you see a lot of counterproductive strategies like drilling kids, cutting out subjects like social studies to focus on reading when research actually shows that the best way to really teach kids in a rich way is to teach kids in a rich way
• schools that don't worry about the test — that actually focus on delivering a powerful curriculum and a powerful instruction to kids — it shows up in the test scores and they do OK
• Teacher unions get blamed for a lot of things that aren't their fault
• On teacher salaries
• We've hired more and more teachers rather than thinking do you potentially think of hiring fewer and paying more. So we're in somewhat of a box of our own creation. Teachers do need to be paid more. They also need to be paid differently.
• When we talk about differentiation, it's about, 'What subjects do you teach?' It is easier to find teachers in some subjects than others
• Some schools are harder to staff than other schools. How can we differentiate and reward that?
• Professionals are rewarded in other fields in non-monetary ways too — opportunities for professional growth, different opportunities for training and so forth

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• But for low-income kids who don’t have those opportunities, fewer school days puts them at an even greater disadvantage.
• For these kids, the nonprofit organization Citizen Schools attempts to fill that gap. The organization works with low-income students in low-performing middle schools across the country to, in essence, lengthen the learning day by “bringing in a second shift of educators who work with students,” says Stacey Gilbert, the organization’s spokesperson.

• That means that every student stays an extra three hours per day, four days a week, working on everything from language arts and math to art and P.E. in project-based groups. (Fridays are used for staff development.)

   

  Here’s what that looks like:
• But more importantly, the intangible results,
• “Things like attitudes, beliefs, if they’re feeling good about their schooling,”
• hands-on project-based learning in middle school students in particular, and students overall, gets them excited about school
• If you’re asking them to stay an additional three hours everyday, what are you doing that’s engaging to them over the longer day?”
• not only students are doing better in school, but that the most at-risk kids are actually going on to high school
• “We’re seeing some success in a number of charter schools and traditional district schools that have extended learning times. That’s because the kids have the extra time to get really engaged. They have more flexibility to learn what they’re interested in by doing things that have been cut out because of the focus on test scores.”
• enrichment programs, in P.E. classes, social studies, science and other areas.  And through the apprenticeship programs, they learn about careers in science, business, journalism, even photography and art
• field trips to colleges
• But aren’t kids tired by 6 o’clock at night?
• “But if the programming is really high quality and does what we want it to do, then kids have energy and are enthusiastic.

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• two separate studies—one by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U.S. Department of Education, the other by a committee constituted by the National Research Council (NRC)—have sought to discredit the work of Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of schools for the District of Columbia
• gains under Rhee were no greater than the gains registered under her predecessor Clifford Janey, who did not use Rhee’s high-powered tactics, such as firing massive numbers of teachers
• second study, the NRC committee does not deny that student performance in the District of Columbia improved under Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship between 2007 and 2010
• says there is no scientific evidence that proves the work of the chancellor is responsible for those gains
• Alan Ginsburg, though now retired, was until very recently the ultimate Washington insider. For more than a generation he was known as the Department of Education’s data-collection guru, the person inside the bureaucracy who understood best what information to collect and how to collect it.
• attack on “The Rhee DC Record.”
• Ginsburg excludes any and all information coming from the D.C. exams, known as the Comprehensive Assessment System (CAS)
• e grounds that “performance levels for 2006 and afterwards are not comparable with those from prior years.”
• does not preclude a comparison of Rhee’s record for the years beginning in 2007 with the situation in the year before she arrived
• Had Ginsburg taken a look at that information, he would have found an acceleration of the gains in the percentage of students deemed proficient
• National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the nation’s report card
• low-stakes test taken only by a representative sample of students, none of whom answer all the questions and for whom no results are reported by student, teacher, or school
• not part of any accountability system, incentives to cheat on the test are minimal, and no allegations of cheating have been made
• Ginsburg does not seem to have much of a case against Rhee. D.C. scores on the NAEP shifted upward during the first two years Rhee was in office. In both 4th-grade math and reading they jumped by 6 points, and in 8th-grade math they leaped by 7 points, though they slipped a point in 8th-grade reading
• Ginsburg says those gains are actually no greater than the ones students had been making in prior years, when superintendents Paul Vance and Clifford Janey were in charge
• So based on Ginsburg’s own calculations, Rhee outperformed her immediate predecessor.
• ignores the fact that the D.C. NAEP sample in 2009 did not include students attending charter schools not authorized by the district
• Most importantly, Ginsburg did not adjust for national trends in student performance occurring between 2000 and 2009
• Unless one adjusts for national trends, one does not know whether gains in the district are due to district-specific events or to some larger developments in the nation
• most straightforward way of adjusting for national trends is to look at the extent to which D.C. closed the gap between its students’ performances and those of students nationwide
• Once that adjustment is made, it can be shown that Rhee did considerably better at that task than did her predecessors

• ; if Rhee-like gains had taken place over the next six years, the gap in 2009 would have been cut in half.

   

  None of this proves that Rhee could sustain the gains observed over a two-year period.
• National Research Council Report
• committee’s official assignment was not to carry out an independent evaluation, as its title implies, but only to 1) “provide guidance on how to structure” that evaluation and 2) “provide feedback about implementation” of the Rhee reforms
• committee calls for “systematic yearly public reporting of key data as well as in-depth studies of high priority issues
• more than just “student test scores,”
• stablish “suitable indicators”
• most of this guidance consists of harmless bromides
• one recommendation has an edge to it: The evaluation “must be independent of school and city leaders and responsive to the needs of all stakeholders.
• context of D.C. politics, this seems to say: Keep the mayor and chancellor out of any independent evaluation, but let the unions play a major role
• How did the committee cast doubt on Rhee’s effectiveness? The general strategy is to admit the evidence on school improvement in D.C., but then insist that it is impossible to see any connection between that improvement and the work of the chancellor.
• Take, for example, the decline in student and teacher truancy. According to 8th-grade student self-reports, the rate of absenteeism declined significantly between 2007 and 2009. Teacher absenteeism also dropped noticeably over these same two years.
• committee cautions: “It is important to note…that the fact that teacher absenteeism is correlated with achievement does not mean that the absenteeism causes the low achievement
• certain bias at work
• committee also acknowledges a notable climb in test scores on the DC CAS test and says that “NAEP shows increases similar to those seen on the CAS.” But, it says, “in comparison with other urban districts, the District’s scores were similar; many others also showed consistently significant gains.”
• committee next worries over whether the gains may be due to a change in the composition of the student population in D.C.
• “The composition of students tested in DCPS…has changed markedly since 2007,” the report says. “These patterns could bias the…statistics.” Education Week’s reporter was told that “the numbers of students with disabilities or limited English proficiency fell during that time. The district also had fewer black students and more white and Hispanic students by 2010.”
• Nothing in these data indicates that the D.C. schools had fewer challenges in 2009 than they had in 2007.
• One does not know how quickly leaders can have an impact on student learning, but strong educational leaders are known for their impact on school culture. If we take Rhee at her word, changing culture was what she was trying to do, and those falling absenteeism indicators suggest that she may have had an effect, even in a short period of time.
• But one can be quite sure that a case against Rhee has yet to be established.
• bias in defense of Rhee the reformer.
• Most people expected that test scores would go up, given the single-minded fixation on the test during the Rhee years.
• costs in teacher and student morale of the punitive approach, and the neglect of perhaps more important emphases have to also be added up and put on the balance sheet.
• For me, the biggest argument against Rhee is her character. Do we really want to follow a person who took pleasure in firing an employee while both were being filmed? I don’t think so.

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• Response to “The Case Against Michelle Rhee”

   

   

    
               
      By Guest Blogger Alan Ginsburg

• What is clear is that DC score gains for all public school students have been impressive over the whole 2000-09 period. That includes the public school student gains under Vance and Janey that were comparable to those under Rhee.

   

  - Alan Ginsburg

• Why Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty Lost

   

         By Diane Ravitch
• film in which Michelle Rhee is portrayed as one of the true heroes of today's school reform movement
• Mayor Adrian Fenty—who appointed Rhee and gave her free rein over the city's long-troubled public schools—lost his bid for re-election
• election was widely viewed as a referendum on Rhee
• allies considered her bold and combative; her opponents considered her divisive and mean-spirited
• Journalists attributed Fenty's loss to the power of the teachers' union
• In the post-election analyses, the most common complaint about Fenty was that he was arrogant and out-of-touch with black voters.
• Rhee spoke about her failure to communicate
• did not lack for opportunities to communicate. Her critics say that her fundamental flaw was arrogance and an indifference to the views of parents and teachers
• Rhee believed that mayoral control gave her the power to work her will and to ignore dissenters or brush them off as defenders of the status quo. Mayoral control bred arrogance and indifference to dialogue.
• Mayoral control made democratic engagement with parents and teachers unnecessary. It became easy for her to disparage them and for the media to treat them as self-interested troublemakers.
• We now have an "education reform" movement which believes that democracy is too slow and too often wrong, and their reforms are so important, so self-evident that they cannot be delayed by discussion and debate. So self-assured are the so-called reformers that they can't be bothered to review the research and evidence on merit pay or evaluating teachers by test scores or the effects of high-stakes testing.

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• value-added data on 18,000 New York City teachers collected between 2007 and 2010
• For sure the ‘reformers’ have won a battle and have unfairly humiliated thousands of teachers who got inaccurate poor ratings
• Up until now, independent researchers like me were unable to support all our claims about how crude a tool value-added metrics still are, though they have been around for nearly 20 years.
• But with the release of the data, I have been able to test many of my suspicions about value-added
• The tricky part about determining the accuracy of these value-added calculations is that there is nothing to compare them to
• So a teacher gets an 80 out of 100 on her value added — what does this mean? 
• Does it mean that the teacher would rank 80 out of 100 on some metric that took into account everything that teacher did?
• On The New York Times website they chose to post a limited amount of data.  They have the 2010 rating for the teacher and also the career rating for the teacher.
• two pieces of data fail to demonstrate the year-to-year variability of these value-added ratings.
• I analyzed the data to see if they would agree with three things I think every person would agree upon:
• A teacher’s quality does not change by a huge amount in one year.  Maybe they get better or maybe they get worse, but they don’t change by that much each year.
•   Teachers generally improve each year. 
• A teacher in her second year is way better than that teacher was in her first year. 
• Maybe you disagree with my #2.  You may even disagree with #1, but you would have to be crazy to disagree with my #3.
• Though the Times only showed the data from the 2009-2010 school year, there were actually three files released, 2009-2010, 2008-2009, and 2007-2008
• Looking over the data, I found that 50% of the teachers had a 21 point ‘swing’ one way or the other.
• There were even teachers who had gone up or down as much as 80 points.  The average change was 25 points.
• t 49% of the teachers got lower value-added in 2010 than they did in 2009, contrary to my experience that most teachers improve from year to year.
• This time, though I used only the 707 teachers who were first year teachers in 2008-2009 and who stayed for a second year in 2009-2010.
• Publishing the scores was puff-your-chest move. Rushing to include VAM in formal evaluations will turn the tide against a potentially promising tool.
• But you can’t put this type of research standard on VAM and then completely ignore it for current measures of quality: experience and master’s degrees.
• econd assumption: “Teachers generally improve each year.” For the first five years, there’s suggestive evidence. From years 6-10, a bit less. From years 10-30, close to none.
• oldhaber found nearly identical distributions of teacher quality comparing two groups: those with and those without master’s degrees.
• VAM, by comparison, is considerably more reliable.
• in the tradeoff between type 1 (dismissing an effective teacher) and type 2 (keeping an ineffective one), which do you choose? The current system runs rampant with type 2
• Sean, what’s this with letting VAM breathe for a few years until the models improve?
• Given that Bloomberg is on record about wanting to fire 50% of NYC teachers, Gates thinks most teachers suck, and Merryl Tisch believes teachers are THE problem in public education
• Therein lies the problem with VAM for me. I do not trust the people implementing it and it is so complex and non-transparent as it now stands that I would be a fool if I did.
• Teachers with one and two years of experience are graded separately, with their percentile rankings representing their performance within the “peer group”. For first year teachers, the peer group consists only of other first year teachers, and likewise for second year teachers; as a result, the expected net improvement in percentile rankings from the first to second year would be close to zero.

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