In his first State of the Union address, President Obama had this to say about tough battles:

“ I never suggested that change would be easy, or that I could do it alone. Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That's just how it is.”

So regardless of whether or not it will be easy (it won’t), whether or not there are other issues flooding the agenda (there are), or whether or not Congress will be distracted by other matters and elections (they will be), we must reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The students who are languishing in America’s failing schools cannot wait. Every day they fall further and further behind; every day their odds of achieving the American dream get a little bit worse. In our land of great opportunity, only one in 10 students from low-income communities graduates from college.

As Margaret Spellings (a signatory of the Education Equality Project) so eloquently points out in her blog post, we must only reauthorize a law that is worth passing – a law that not only takes up, but improves upon NCLB’s goals of closing our country’s achievement gaps and ensuring that a high quality education is available for every student in our country.

Like any piece of wide ranging policy, we didn’t get it completely right the first time. Many components of the law need to be re-conceived in its second iteration. There are, however, key components of NCLB that changed education policy in our country profoundly and positively, and we must not lose these critical elements.

NCLB set the stage in three important ways.

First, NCLB reflected the good school promise – every family deserves a quality public school. In the 1990s, chronic school failure was widely accepted, with failing schools concentrated in low-income minority neighborhoods. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that the problem was simply too big to solve. NCLB created the first-ever, national school accountability platform mandating that every state take progressive steps towards turning around struggling schools. The problems with the framework quickly became apparent, but the mere establishment of a federally mandated school accountability system was a crucial civil rights victory.

Second, NCLB redefined success by requiring us to investigate the progress of every child rather than relying on average achievement. Prior to NCLB, schools were not required to track the achievement of subgroups of students (e.g., low-income, minority, special education, etc.). We had no real idea how these students were faring in our educational system. NCLB mandated that local and state agencies disaggregate data and take specific steps to ensure that all sub-groups are progressing. Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) clearly needs to be reworked, but the hard-won “all means all” core of NCLB must remain central to federal education policy.

And finally, NCLB reflected the good teacher promise – that every student deserves a good teacher, every year, in every class. The provision that become known as “Highly Qualified Teacher” relied too heavily on traditional preparation and certification routes as a proxy for quality (and was written in a way that made it easy for states to game), but it was an important recognition that two ineffective teachers in a row could derail the life of a low-income student permanently.

Was the original NCLB a perfect bill? Most certainly not. Was it an enormous improvement over existing (non-existing) policy? Emphatically yes. With only their opening plans to judge them by, it is clear that Obama and Duncan have indeed breathed new life into this legislation by retaining the bill’s core equity goals while vastly improving upon the means to meet these goals. Launched by a Republican President and improved upon by a Democrat – I can think of no better, bipartisan, way to move towards equity in education. We’ve got no time to lose.

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The greatest gift the nation has received from NCLB as envisioned by the Bush Administration and now as acted upon by the Obama Administration has been an unapologetic dedication to getting the facts about schools onto the streets.

All of our discussion here is fascinating to me, even when it feels a bit dissonant with the struggle in neighborhoods for an education that matters. The struggle is on now because the facts are finally coming out. Families are getting some truth about their children and their schools because there is AT LEAST one assessment of their children now. At least one, at last.

The law could be a lot better - if we use what we have learned to strengthen its intention to shine a light on every child in our schools. But changes in the law can also propel us backward, into the day when everybody got an A and nobody knew the difference. Because everybody got a different test.

I never doubt Secretary Duncan's ability to move folks to action. So I think the Congress will move on this.

But where they go with it is what matters. If we can strengthen the information that states produce and make it more useful to families through a change in ESEA, we should. If reauthorization jumps the tracks and takes a path that will leave families in the dark about where their kids are, we should drop it like a hot potato.

The information families are finally getting about their children is not perfect, but it is more than we have ever had. Right now, that information is good enough to act on, and the fight for quality schools is finally underway. It is slow, it is not nearly enough, but the fight has gone to the streets. We need to keep that serious progress top of mind.

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Forty states and the District of Columbia submitted applications for the Race to the Top competition last month, many trying to outdo each other with aggressive plans to tackle perennial challenges like improving teacher effectiveness and dealing with severely underperforming schools. While some of the proposals may be somewhat insincere—representing a marked departure from past behavior—others build on work begun in leading states and districts before the prospect of extra cash was dangled before them. Regardless, new energy and more creativity and brainpower are undeniably being applied to some of our most pressing policy issues, and that is a hopeful signal for ESEA.

Congress should capitalize on this momentum and move quickly to reauthorize the law, working with the Administration. If Congress does not act, here are some of the briar patches ahead:

• States and districts will continue to puzzle through a hodgepodge of mismatched accountability requirements among ESEA and ARRA programs, creating confusion and bureaucracy.
• States will (we hope) adopt higher, common standards and corresponding assessments—but these will not be aligned with ESEA’s current accountability framework.
• ARRA funding will run out, and will have limited long-term impact if its reforms are not reinforced and extended to more students and schools by ESEA.
• Needed changes to the law, such as expanding the use of growth models and meaningful accountability for high schools, will continue to languish.
• ESEA will fall farther out of step with the activities of leading states and districts, and may stifle good ideas and innovation.

The best way to stem these troublesome tides is to update ESEA thoughtfully—starting now—making sure to maintain urgency for increasing the academic achievement of all kids.

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First, I want to say to my friend, Michael Lomax, that I totally agree with him about the urgency of moving toward college/career readiness for all our students. There is much fine work being done around the country in this area, and federal policy ought to promote it with great vigor.

The issue really is how best to do that. Perhaps we could have a separate discussion devoted solely to that topic.

Second, with respect to the ongoing dialogue with Ms. Browne-Dianis on dropout and graduation rates, I would make a few points.

The data set she relies on has its own methodological problems, as do all the other approaches. I won't bore our readers with a discussion of them.

Rather, I will simply say that according to each and every one of them, including Ms. Browne-Dianis' chosen method, the status set I cited, the AFGR I cited, and the event dropout data - according to all of them, the numbers have improved over the past ten years.

Whatever her (or my) feelings about NCLB might be, it simply doesn't flow from any of these sets of data that NCLB has contributed to increased dropouts. This is so because dropouts have not increased; they've decreased.

NCLB has basically caused each and every student to be looked at in reading and math each year. Further, it has required that if poor, minority, and disabled students are not making academic progress, their schools must be improved.

Again - whatever one may think of NCLB and with no intention on my part to prove anything, it doesn't surprise me that the graduation rate picture has improved in the decade in which these requirements have been implemented.

Where Ms. Browne-Dianis and I totally agree is that so much more needs to be done. I'm involved in a number of efforts and would be glad to team up with her on these and hers. Just to describe one area, I've seen some really good initiatives built around the proven practices highlighted in the IES practice guide on dropouts.

So much to do.

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Reauthorizing NCLB in 2010 will be a very difficult task. One reason is the many other time-demanding issues occupying Congress. Did you note how often President Obama asked the Senate to pass something the House had passed? This is partly because it is simply harder to pass anything in the Senate, for multiple reasons. And it'll be very hard to lower partisanship as the election gets going.

But there are deep substantive issues too, carried forward by various political groupings. At one end is the 'keep NCLB' faction, represented thus far on this blog in response to this question by Sec. Spellings and Sandy Kress. They continue to claim NCLB is working despite the great evidence showing it does not. However, they have their representation in Congress within both parties.

But there is opposition in both parties to continuing the failed NCLB policies, for reasons that are the same and different. For example, Rep. Kline, the Ranking Member in the House Education Committee has called for requiring fewer tests, which some Democrats also support, as do major education groups. Some Democrats won't be happy unless there is significantly more federal support for ensuring all children have a fair and reasonable opportunity to learn, but some Republicans likely will view this as intrusive. In both parties are many who want assessment and accountability changed, but there are so many voices and ideas, it is hard now to know what will emerge, or how long it will take. (See www.fairtest.org and http://www.edaccountability.org/ for positive proposals). With multiple perspectives and agendas dividing each party, finding sufficient consensus to push a new law will be hard.

The language from Duncan that has Sandy concerned is very opaque. It could signal support for intensifying the worst components of NCLB – apply high-stakes testing to teachers even beyond what "Race to the Trough" has done; require harder-to-pass tests and perhaps even more testing; mandate still onerous if somewhat different 'accountabilty' expectations; and let private companies control ever more schools, further diminishing the public sphere.

Alternatively, the Department could be serious about much greater state flexibility, hence cutting back on the amount and intensity of testing and scrapping the counter-productive complexities of AYP and sanctions. Promoting major assessment changes – not just a new series of standardized tests – and finding ways to respond to each school based on a rich set of qualitative and quantitative evidence, such as through supporting state systems of inspectorates, seem within the realm of possibility.

Thus far, as shown by RTTT, Sec. Duncan has not done well as he has expanded NCLB's approach and insisted on 'reforms' that at best lack evidence they will improve schools and at worse will extend NCLB's damage. Still, some signals are at least promising, and there are people in Congress who will push for a real overhaul of the law.

In any case, even if reauthorization does not pass this year, the debates and battles will be important because they will have an impact on what happens next year.

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Our recent report, Test, Punish, and Push Out: How Zero Tolerance and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School-to-Prison Pipeline (http://advancementproject.org/sites/default/files/publications/01-EducationReport-2009v8-HiRes.pdf), argues that testing is part of what is contributing to the “dropout crisis” that most observers, including our President, have acknowledged.

The federal data that Mr. Kress references is troubling on many fronts: first, to rebut the graduation rate numbers that I cite, he refers to unreliable (and unresponsive) drop-out rate statistics; second, he does not take into account the ongoing controversy about how graduation rates are calculated; and third, he does not see the numbers as a reflection of lived experience.

The fact of the matter is that the federal (NCEIS) calculation of dropout rates is notoriously unreliable for a number of reasons. A more accurate measure would be to look at graduation rates to see the nature and extent of the crisis. However, that leads us to the second problem: graduation rates are tricky. Once again, the federal graduation rate calculations cited by Mr. Kress are unreliable (they have been critiqued for, among other things over-counting by including students with GEDs as graduates). Many have called for creating a consistent and more accurate national graduation rate calculation. Advancement Project has chosen to cite to EdWeek’s “Diplomas Count,” (http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/06/11/index.html) which is a consistent and reliable calculation of graduation rates that allows for comparison across school, district, and state lines. EdWeek’s method best captures who does and does not graduate.

Advancement Project’s work is grounded in the real struggles of communities of color. Through our work we have seen the “dropout crisis” intertwining with the school-to-prison pipeline and high stakes testing. Mr. Kress tells us that things must be improving because graduation rates are going up. But whether that’s true on the national level or not, it disregards the troubling insight from our recent report showing that graduation rates in the 100 largest cities have gone into steep decline since 2002. Students, educators, and communities – especially in low income communities of color – understand that there are drastic problems that are pushing students out of school and that testing is part of that problem.

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Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act can be accomplished in 2010. And NEA is committed to working collaboratively with the Obama administration, legislators, and other education stakeholders to overhaul this critical legislation this year.

Swift action to rewrite and renew ESEA is in the best interests of children and educators. The need for change is indisputable. The current system -- where almost one-third of high school freshman don't graduate -- is failing to meet the needs of too many students. And educators are chafing under a system that unfairly measures schools and students based solely on test scores.

ESEA reauthorization should truly support a world-class education system that prepares students to become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and globally competent. A revamped ESEA should encourage and reward innovation, provide for greater flexibility and better quality tests, ensure multiple ways of measuring school quality and student learning, and elevate the profession of teaching. Now is the time to work with the Department of Education and Congress to shape policies that will do just that.

President Obama's call to action in the State of the Union address is a sign of his commitment to reforming ESEA. And it can be done in 2010, if lawmakers set aside the politics of obstruction for the good of the nation's schoolchildren.

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The fact that, in the early responses to this question, a Democratic subcommittee chairman and Republican former Secretary of Education both believe that it is possible to pass a strong, bipartisan ESEA reauthorization bodes well for getting this important job done, done right, and done this year. As much partisan division as exists in Washington, the very fact that improving the education we give our children enjoys wide bipartisan support should give it a good head start to passage.

I am especially heartened by Congressman Kildee’s commitment to reauthorizing ESEA He is a veteran of many a congressional education battle and knows whereof he speaks. More important, he is in a position to make good on his commitment, to move a strong ESEA reauthorization bill through the House of Representatives.

It can’t happen too soon. No Child Left Behind was a signal achievement when it was passed. But in addition to the specific fixes to NCLB that will be discussed over the next months, we need to make sure that reauthorization focuses the legislation so that it is oriented correctly: not toward high school graduation as an end in itself, but toward high school graduation as a milestone on the pathway to the post-secondary education that the 21st century job market—and the needs of our civil society—demand.

This means that all students, not just some students, should have access to a rigorous academic education. Such an education should include advanced algebra and pre-calculus instead of general math, an English curriculum that develops the ability to write and to write well, a thorough grounding in the physical and biological sciences, and an understanding in economics and finance. It should also include an emphasis on skills required to support continuous learning over the course of their lives (e.g., critical thinking, flexibility, and working with diverse groups of people. We are well into an economy in which changing jobs and changing careers must be taken as a given. We need to prepare our students for that eventuality.

Not every student will be able to take full advantage of the education that this approach will offer. But we must reverse the presumption that now rules our system of education, the presumption that only a few students have what it takes to get a rigorous academic education and a college degree. We are better off setting high standards, even if not everyone meets them, than we are setting standards that are so low that all can meet them. Every student must have the opportunity to succeed, must have the chance to aspire to the best education our society offers. Just as we must stop rationing education, we must stop rationing aspiration.

A reauthorized ESEA also needs to recognize that this rigorous academic education cannot be left for high school. Students who have not been given demanding math courses in elementary school, for example, will not be prepared to take college-preparatory algebra when they reach the ninth grade.

There is a penalty to be paid for not orienting our P-12 education toward college graduation, a penalty that our students are already paying. Many students will not graduate from high school, or will graduate but go no further. Their odds of earning a middle-class living and living a middle-class life-style—including steering their own children to college—will be sharply diminished. Others will receive their high school diplomas and proceed to college—only to discover that before they can begin to earn college credits, they must take remedial or developmental courses, re-learning at college, and while paying college tuition, subjects they should have been taught in high school. The toll that takes on family resources and student aid availability is high, and rapidly becomes a steep barrier to persistence through graduation.

These are the children who will be left behind if we put off ESEA reauthorization until next year.

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Ms. Browne-Dianis keeps repeating the allegation that graduation rates hover around 50% for children of color and that NCLB hasn't helped. I don't know whether NCLB has helped or not, but the real data are much better than she says and they've improved since NCLB passed.

According to federal data, the African American dropout rate is now lower than the general dropout rate! Only 8.4% of African Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 in 2007 are not in school and without a high school credential. The percent for the total population between those ages was 8.7. This is a stunning improvement that ought to be celebrated, or at least known!http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=16

If you're interested in the averaged freshman graduation rate trends, look at table 104 in the link below to federal data. The rate went down throughout the nineties and has gone up consistently since 2000.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009020.pdf

I don’t think that Secretary Duncan and President Obama are breathing new life into the effort to reauthorize NCLB as much as using their leadership to build momentum for Congress to undertake the task. Both the president and secretary have been promoting changes in education on an ongoing basis. Education is an important domestic issue and the longer it takes to fix the problems with NCL, the more states will have to deal with a growing number of school districts falling into the sanctions provision of the law.

While it may not be difficult to generate momentum to reauthorize the law in 2010, the political realities for going through the entire process for the House and Senate in an election year don’t bode well for completing the task. It is already February and members hope to leave early to work on their campaigns in what may be a very challenging year for them. And, the other issues including jobs and the economy are likely to consume most of the legislative time this year.

My sense is that Secretary Duncan has done a good job laying the foundation for a future reauthorization and getting the process started but it isn’t likely to happen this year.

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One of the things I love about this venue is that some of the people who show up here were “there” when it all began. When a former Secretary of Education and a former Bush administration ed advisor weigh in, we get a perspective we can’t get any other way—unless we want to take them to lunch or something, and I can’t afford the plane tickets. So today I’d like to “dine” with Ms. Spellings and Mr. Kress over ideas.

Ms. Spellings says, “Any new law must be a step toward more—not less—robust accountability for schools in order to ensure every child is well educated.”

Mr. Kress concurs with even stronger language, “…if you weaken the accountability provisions of NCLB, we will see a serious falloff in achievement for students, particularly disadvantaged students.”

Both of these statements make sense to me. But how exactly do we go about strengthening accountability in ways that we know will lead to improved student achievement?

Accountability, as it is practiced in education, is based on two premises: (1) That the entity being held to account will find potential sanctions meaningful enough to voluntarily alter his/her/its behavior in a positive way; and (2) That this same entity, once sufficiently motivated by the potential of meaningful sanctions, has the ability to achieve the desired results.

Unless both of these premises are true, accountability fails. If we look back at which schools made progress as a direct result of NCLB and which did not, we will likely see that this simple calculus is a viable rubric for future prescriptions as well.

Let’s look first at the idea of “meaningful sanctions” in education. The AYP-induced multi-year drop-down approach of NCLB hasn’t yielded much in terms of actually moving schools forward. Clearly, being labeled a “failing” school does not motivate the people who work in them to make sufficient changes in their behavior. From the 200 or so schools I’ve been in, it seems that the negative labeling lowers moral at first, and after the initial sting, has no effect whatsoever. In fact, the longer schools languish with sub-standard performance and no tangible adverse effects, the more likely they are to ignore the entire measurement system. Few teachers and principals actually believe in testing as a valid evaluation of who they are or what they do. So the variety of failure designations used by NCLB is of little consequence and may, over time, make educators pay less attention to the accountability provisions of the law.

However, there is an important artifact of having test score data that few reformers, pro- or anti-NCLB, ever mention: transparency. Because of the inherent code of secrecy in schools, transparency has great potential to change behaviors in ways that could change education culture permanently. Educators are extremely self-conscious about their work. This is one reason they insist on both freedom and privacy, and why they so fiercely resist evaluation of all kinds despite handing it out to their students on a daily basis. For these reasons, and others, test score transparency could work wonders. I’ve seen schools get fired up more by the fact that test score data was simply published in a highly conspicuous way, like the local paper, than by anything related to NCLB accountability.

Perhaps then, accountability is the wrong approach. Maybe transparency is what we really need. It’s cheaper, both politically and practically. And, in any case, we've got a testable hypothesis here. I, for one, would like to see it tested, and am sorry that it won’t be. This aversion we have to testing things before we try them—when we ourselves demand that others be tested and use only tested tools—seems like an inherent contradiction to me in the way our government carries out its reform agenda, and one of the main reason why so many educators do not take the federal government very seriously. Testing the potential of transparency as a motivator should appeal well to the same free-market capitalists who support increased accountability, and to others as well who view competition as the most natural path to improvement.

Like it or hate it, I think we all agree that NCLB has not been the most natural path; it has simply caused us to focus needlessly on too many aspects of traditional school culture that give us little leverage toward improvement. I’ve worked in many schools that were in “corrective action” or “restructuring”, for example. But these schools don’t actively correct themselves, and they are almost never restructured in a way that makes things better. I have seen schools miss AYP every single year and face no practical sanctions or changes at all; merely changes in their designation of failure and small amounts of additional funding that were spent just as poorly as any other money they may have received. Though I’ve heard that school retstructurings exist, I have never seen one where completely new groups of people were brought in fresh to being anew. Nor have I seen CMO’s swooping in to charter these wayward institutions toward high-efficiency success. From my perspective in the field, dropping to the bottom of the NCLB ladder has almost no practical effect at all. One principal told me it was actually something of a relief to hit rock bottom. At least her district got off her back about always getting worse each year.

I would submit, then, that the sanctioning component of NCLB did not work well at the building level simply because individual schools don’t find it particularly meaningful to be labeled as failing. They may not like being labeled that way. But this is a far cry from actually doing anything to change it. We also know that virtually no children moved from lower-performing schools to higher-performing schools even when given the opportunity to do so. Furthermore, the “suggested restructuring” component of NCLB, which would have to be the ultimate consequence short of boarding up the windows and shutting down the building forever, didin’t inspire much success either, although I’m sure there have been exceptions. We have discovered, not surprisingly, that states are loathe to use the most dramatic options, and as most of us noted on this forum some time ago, restarts and turnarounds have very low probabilities of success anyway.

So let me be clear yet again: I’m pro-accountability. But I don’t just want more this time, I want better, too.

Now, let’s look at the second component of accountability in education: the ability, once sanctioned, of a school to right its wrongs.

What are the odds that a school which has failed six years in a row—and received extra help almost all the way down—would be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps without hoisting itself on its own petard? And then move up from there, year after consistently improving year, to exceed all previously-achieved levels of performance well into the future? For all practical purposes, I would submit that the likelihood is near zero. There are two simple reasons why schools fail year after year: poor teaching and weak leadership. Neither of these seems to get much better even with additional funding, support, or sanctions. Call it the “Silk Purse, Sow’s Ear” principle if you like. It’s all about the raw materials. That shouldn’t be surprising to any of us. But it seems to have been an unforeseen aspect of NCLB’s original approach to accountability.

Again, I have many clients in “corrective action” and “restructuring”. They don’t know what to do to improve; if they did, they’d do it, if only because it’s easier to be out of corrective actiong or restructuring than it is to be in them. When these schools pay me lots of money to tell them how they can make dramatic improvements, they don’t want to do the things I recommend because the things I recommend—the real things that I can prove would solve their problems—are hard to do. Moreover, once a school has hit bottom, there’s not really much more you can sanction it with. And most teachers have figured out that few schools get restructured, and that even in complete restructurings, most of a building’s original teachers are rehired, or find jobs elsewhere. The prospect of restructuring is unpleasant but not nearly unpleasant enough it would seem to get anyone to change their behavior—even if they wanted to change it which, in most cases, I think they really do, but really can’t because they simply lack the talent.

I won’t state this as an excuse, but I will state it as a fact: most of the clients I’ve worked with have been unable—even when reasonably willing and fully supported—to improve their schools in any significant way. I guess you could put the blame on me. But I don’t think I would have been working for 15 years in this business if I was the problem. And I really don’t think my clients are the problem either.

The problem is that our nation lacks a sufficiently talented workforce to meet the learning needs of our children.

People think we can solve the human capital problem through organizations like TFA, or with better pre-service and in-service training, or with alternative certification programs, or with good ol’ fashioned American grit. Certainly, these things are valuable, and a few programs, like TFA, make a measurable difference. But as a nation, we have not yet acknowledged the simple fact that our stock of talented teachers is extremely low, and that no program yet devised (or perhaps even conceived) has approached the level of success and scale required.

Demographics don’t lie. We’ve got many kids heading into our schools at the same time many teachers are heading out. And it would seem that our most talented teachers, from our most innovative programs (like TFA, for example), don’t stay in the classroom very long, though many do stay in education finding roles as school leaders and contributing to the education sector.

We don’t just have a human capital problem in education, we have a human capital CRISIS! No amount of threat, no degree of restructuring, no carrots, no sticks, no element of accountability can make up for the fact that we do not have enough competent teachers in our country—and that we’re not doing anything about it. I see no provision in the current ESEA that would change this. I hear of no Beltway chatter on the matter regarding the forthcoming ESEA either. Obviously, it's not an important issue. But it is an important truth.

I still support stronger accountability. It’s just hard to find a politician who will stand up for what stronger accountability would have to look like in order for it to work. Strong or weak, loose or tight, robust or fragile, we have a problem with accountability in federal education policy. And in an ironic application of the Pogo principle, we have met the enemy, and it is us. By all means, let’s ratchet things up. I know I get more out of kids in the classroom when I raise my expectations and change my behaviors in the process. But I know what I’m ratcheting and why. And I know exactly how to capitalize on the stronger accountability I create. I know how to motivate kids through both positive and negative incentives. But as yet, our government has not figured out how to motivate educators.

And yet it’s not that hard, really.

If you want to motivate teachers, you just have to understand what motivates them. Teachers tend to be motivated by the following: not-too-large classes of kids who learn a lot and are well-behaved, a steady (though not large) paycheck, pleasant working conditions, ample resources, the complete absence of time-wasting b*llsh*t from their administrators and districts, Christmas vacations, spring breaks, and summers off, being left alone to teach the way they want, and working in schools with their friends.

If we’re serious about getting teachers to change their behavior through accountability, we’re gonna have to pull on some of these levers to make it happen. Teachers don’t care about test scores very much—except in relation to each other, which is where the transparency thing crops up. But they certainly don’t care very much about the aggregated scores of their school, district, or state. Note that, in my opinion and experience, increasing pay is not a particularly efficient lever. Decreases in pay, however, might work because teachers are usually broke and need every penny they can pull together just to get by. (But lowering teacher pay for any reason would be unconscionable, would it not?) Nobody goes into teaching to make money. As such, teaching as a profession does not draw many people who possess sufficient economic sensitivity such that even large changes in pay would result in even modest changes in practice. Truth is, most teachers teach about as well as they can most of the time no matter what you pay them. (This is why in-service training doesn’t help much; and I’m a consultant who sells in-service training, so I’m not only a good judge, I’m also honest enough to tell the truth even when it hurts my bank account.)

Carrot or stick, take your pick. If you don’t pull the right levers, nothin’s gonna happen. If you want to pay teachers more money, go ahead, but you won't get much bank for your buck. If you want to train in-service teachers, try that, too, but here again all you’re likely to get is teachers who spend a lot of time terrified at the prospect that they might some day have to use the training they have received. Tie teachers to their test scores and put them under a microscope with new evaluation tools; this will scare them, too, if that’s what you’re looking for. The bottom line on teacher accountability is this: the only meaningful threat to a teacher is losing his or her job—permanently. Few teachers, especially veterans with higher-than-average salaries could command anything near what they make in the classroom on the general job market. So the prospect of permanent dismissal is a powerful lever—it’s also a patently heartless one to pull, or ever to threaten pulling. And while it does represent an avenue for stronger accountability, I myself do not have the stomach for it, nor do I think it would improve things very much. And although most of America seems ready to toss out bad teachers by the truckload, I’ve not seen one credible proposal about how we would replace even our worst 10% (that’s about 400,000 people) with a new 10% that would be any better.

Principals, however, are another matter entirely. I’ve always wondered how they keep dodging the accountability bullet. Principals care principally about the following: great teachers, safe and orderly schools, schools that are well-maintained, money, parents who don’t kick their asses all the time, and the promise of never having to go back to the classroom.

Now there’s an interesting lever. How about an accountability program for principals that busts them back to Biology if they don’t hit their test score targets? That would cost them money, force them to face kids again, and also help the teacher talent problem because many, if not most, principals were at one time better-than-average teachers. (Too severe again? Probably. But if we want stronger accountability, that’s certainly stronger than what we have now.)

Principals represent the optimal point of leverage for accountability within the system. First of all, they are crucial to the long term success and stability of their schools. Second, at a mere 100,000 strong they are a relatively small group of people to influence. And third, unlike teachers, they are easily replaced if lost or stolen. With four million teachers, many of whom either have administrative credentials already, or are in the process of getting them, filling vacancies in the principalship is doable.

Now let’s turn to the superintendency. It is believed that no accountability is needed at this level of the system because superintendents are directly accountable to their boards. Again, however, most people aren’t aware of how difficult it is for most boards to make important decisions that involve big changes. In particular, boards detest firing superintendents because it’s often highly controversial, extremely expensive, and just plain no fun at all. And then it’s up to the board to find a new one. Since most school board members are not executive talent scouts, the prospect of a search, interviews, negotiations, etc., is quite daunting.

Be that as it may, federal accountability for superintendents could be the strongest form of accountability of all. Beloved or not by their communities, superintendents who can’t hit district-wide performance targets would have to go. Why would this work? First, there’s a great crop of people being trained right now specifically for the challenge of the superintendency. In years to come, we will have the best superintendents we have ever had. Second, as with principals, superintendents are easily replaced. And third, districts can function just fine without superintendents for long periods of time—perhaps, in small districts, even forever.

To make accountability even stronger, we could create a program for principals and superintendents that involved licensure. Miss your targets, lose your license to practice—anywhere in the public school system in all 50 states. Too harsh? Most assuredly. But it once again demonstrates the power of leverage when you put the lever in the right place and pull it for all it’s worth. I guarantee that if we change the behaviors and choices of 100,000 principals and 15,000 superintendents (as opposed to obsessing over four million union-protected teachers), we can change American education without closing a school, giving a test, or firing anyone. This is the promise of strong accountability: better results, less collateral damage, cleaner reform all the way around.

(As an aside, I think a lot about opportunity cost. What if the Race to the Top money had been strategically targeted at specific levels within this system? With Obama’s new money, RttT is worth a cool six billion. Divide that by 115,000 principals and superintendents and I think you’ll be as shocked as I was about how much we could have spent on our school systems’ most influential leaders.)

Ms. Spellings and Mr. Kress are correct when they argue for stronger accountability. But are we ready to face what stronger accountability is, and if so, are we strong enough to enact it, prosecute it, and clean up after it?

And then there’s another odd wrinkle here that I’ve always wondered about.

Most of the pro-accountability folks I know are also free market types. (I’m a modified free market man myself; I believe in just slightly different rules for the social sector when people’s lives are on the line.). So why is it that accountability in education has fallen so heavily on the workers rather than on the people for whom they work? Every free market capitalist I’ve ever met knows where the buck stops. That’s certainly true in my little organization. I reap the biggest rewards; I take the biggest hits. If something isn’t working, it’s on me to fix it. I take this form of accountability for granted, as do most business owners and government leaders I know. So why don’t we apply it in education? I mean, what’s good for the goose, and all that, right?

I am not being coy here; quite the opposite, in fact. Most people who want increased accountability are themselves highly accountable leaders in their own spheres of influence, thoroughly responsible people who step up and take the heat when the kitchen’s cookin’. These people have an intuitive grasp of the type of accountability we’re struggling with in education. Yet they do not apply their own knowledge and life experience to education policy in this regard. Ms. Spellings is the President of Margaret Spellings and Company. She knows who’s accountable in her organization. And I’ll bet it’s her. I don’t see why that same logic couldn’t be applied to the people who run our schools.

So keep in mind that there are two parts to improving accountability: meaningful sanctions and reform know-how. And both must work in order for accountability to work. Unfortunately, we seem to shy away from meaningful sanctions, or at least we pretend not to know what they are. And we simply don’t have enough reformers out there who know how to reform sanctioned schools—another detail we seem to avoid.

And yet, there remain possible solutions to this conundrum—if we dare to dream them. For example, consider a simple “divide and conquer” strategy. We could call it “targeted accountability”. It would work like this: Ratchet accountability way up but at the primary grades only. And let everything else go. Force districts to put all their energy into early reading, writing, math, and parent education. Make districts move their best principals to elementary schools and their best teachers to primary grades. Put all our training eggs into the K-2 basket, even at the university level. Go all in on the first three years of school because those are the years that determine the last ten. Once that’s under control, move the “targeting” up a few years and go from there.

Sound flakey to you? I’m dead serious about it. The statistics about kids who can’t read, write, and think by third grade are shocking. Early failure in school has almost the same correlation with future failure as straight socio-economics. Yet we have no specific policy known to positively effect this crucial time in children’s learning lives. No assessnebt, no meaningful standards, no curriculum, and no national consensus at all about something as simple and essential as early reading instruction. There’s virtually no accountability at this level either—and this is the most important level! Reading First was a bust because we got the science backwards: starting with phonics and working up rather than from comprehension down got us research data that showed Reading First kids being slightly better at phonics but no better at reading. The recent literacy bill doesn’t seem to be based on much of anything, except maybe some politician’s re-election potential. So why do we keep overlooking the most important “sector” of our school system? If we’re serious about accountability, let’s put it where it will do the most good. And for Christ’s sake, let’s use some decent science this time. If NIH can handle cancer research, it can surely figure out how to teach kids to read. One word of advice this time: hire people who’ve actually taught kids to read as part of your team. It’ll make a big difference, trust me on that. (Sorry for the snark. But I’m still pissed about the last six billion dollars we blew on Reading First. If RttT doesn’t come up smellin’ like roses, I’m going on the war path for big time accountability in federal education spending. Heed my words, poeple. Heads will roll, even if I have no power to roll them. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.)

In addition to focusing our efforts where they are needed most, reforming only the primary grades would give us a leg up on the human capital problem. Do you think that out of four million teachers, there might be a million pretty good ones? I do. Do you think that out of 100,000 principals, we could find maybe 40,000 reasonably effective school leaders? And how much easier would it be to replace retiring teachers if we only worried about putting high quality folks at the primary grades and used alternative certification programs to cover losses up the chain?

Now, nobody’s gonna go for this, of course, because it’s not part of the mainstream dialog on education in our country—and I don’t have any letters after my name. But that’s sort of my point. Deep down, in places we don’t talk about at parties, there are a lot of things about school that we don’t talk about at all. The nitty-gritty of accountability is one; the lack of good science is another; and the fact that we’re still guessing at ed reform is probably the biggest and most embarrassing secret of all. I truly believe that everyone involved is doing their very best. And I thank people like Ms. Spellings and Mr. Kriss for getting NCLB started. At the very least, we established that the federal government has a role to play beyond simply assuring funding and fairness. But we have put far too few ideas on the table, and those we have proposed have been far too timid.

So what about “targeted accountability”? You could call it crazy. But you couldn’t say it wasn’t an interesting idea, or that you knew it wouldn’t make a difference, or that it wasn’t based on rock solid data about the influence of early literacy on future educational outcomes. And this is more than can be said for our current approach. I bring up this idea, not as a serious suggestion for ESEA reauthorization, but as an example of how limited our thinking is in this country with regard to reform. Even here in this forum, with so many of the best minds in education today, we rarely hear of a novel idea. There are no votes to be won or lost here, no grants to apply for, no contracts to win or lose, ones favor to curry. Yet we pretty much talk about the same things week in and week out. This week it’s accountability. Some of us will want more, others less. But will anyone put forth a specific idea about what “more” might mean? Or how they know that “less” might be better? Other than just their ideological discomfort with “more”? (Monty, I know you have a ton of great data but for whatever reason, your arguments are not swaying the masses these days. I hope someday they will because I believe our government could learn a lot from the information you have compiled.)

One can only ask as much accountability of another as he is willing to ask of himself. As the leaders of our education system, and as education thought-leaders in forums like this, we must hold ourselves accountable for much better thinking about reform. New ideas are sorely needed, and not just pipe dreams and concepts, either. We need detailed, researched, replicable proposals from people who are willing to tell us exactly how they think something’s going to work—and then be willing to be held accountable to see that it does.

Stronger accountability is a necessity; I wish it wasn’t, but it is. That’s why I support Ms. Spellings, Mr. Kress, and many others in calling for a new ESEA with much-improved accountability provisions. But we also need to put more ideas in the hopper. We seem to have research on just about everything in education today, what’s the research on accountability? Why don’t we know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to encouraging people to do what works? Race to the Top is six billion dollars worth of buckshot, and we sing its praises as if it were a laser-guided missile with a nuclear warhead. We all hope RttT hits something, but once again we just don’t know. We don’t know how accountability works either. So part of asking for more of it has to be figuring out what “more” means and how we know “more” will work better than what we’ve got now. If we can’t be accountable for that, how can we ask anyone in education to be accountable for anything?

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The jury is out as to whether the Obama Administration can move anything this year on ESEA. The Administration’s top two agenda items – jobs and health care – have yet to cross the finish line. To introduce ESEA in this context may be a bad sign. Either it won’t move or even worse, it will move with no substantial change in order to get a policy win before the mid-term elections.

My advice: take it slow on this one, Mr. President. ESEA needs a major overhaul so our children can be the ultimate winners. The goal of accountability is on the right track but how we get there must be re-examined. The focus should no longer be limited, solely, to measuring the success of schools, students and districts based on test-score performance among various groups. This is not the measure of whether children are receiving a high-quality education that prepares them for college.

We need to take the time to devise a strategy that works for our children. Closing schools and opening new ones in their place because test scores are not improving is not the answer. Filling in bubbles all day to questions that don’t hone in on higher order thinking skills is not the answer. Continuing to have unqualified teachers in classrooms with the neediest children is not the answer. And clearly, graduation rates that hover around 50% for children of color and less than that in many of our largest school districts are not the answer. NCLB has not fixed these problems.

Hopefully, it the Obama Administration is ready to use its political capital to add this important issue to an already overwhelming agenda, they will take the time to get it right.

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Mr. Secretary, first, I want to congratulate you for a superb year. You pushed solid reforms intelligently and effectively. In doing so, you helped President Obama nobly carry the baton he received from Presidents Clinton and Bush in the effort to improve education for all students, particularly the disdvantaged.

But, I must confess to being baffled by today's story in The New York Times about the direction you're headed. If it is inaccurate, I apologize in advance for assuming it to be true. If it is true, however, I am disappointed.

You are said to want to abandon (not fix, change, extend, but rather abandon) the bipartisan goal set 9 years ago in NCLB of having students at the minimum bar of grade level proficiency by 2014. Apparently, this goal is "utopian," in your mind.

Yet, you have separately said that the standards behind these goals for 2014 are "fraudulently low" and that they should be dramatically raised to "college/career ready." You'll get no argument from me about raising the bar.

But look at the whole of what you're proposing. We can't make the lower bar, you say, so, while eliminating that goal, you're out to set a much higher bar.

This is akin to saying though we can't high jump at 5 feet, let's set the bar at 7 feet!

Or, reflecting on President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon in a decade, it's as if, having trouble getting to the goal mid-decade, we should have discarded it and simply declared we'll put a man on Jupiter!

I don't know whether getting a man on the moon in the sixties was more or less "utopian" than getting our students to the minimum goal of "grade level" over 12 years. What I do know is that scrapping that goal and replacing it with a much tougher and higher goal with no challenging annual markers and deadlines for its achievement is real fraud.

Further, according to the story, you favor dropping adequate yearly progress and judging schools in a more "nuanced" way. I suspect this fits with your pledge to "loosen" NCLB.

Mr. Secretary, here's the secret: despite all the moaning and groaning, NCLB is plenty loose. It not only allows states to set the standards, determine the tests, and set performance standards; it also lets the states establish their own accountability sysytems and further permits the states and districts to apply appropriate consequences of their choice for failure to make AYP from a broad list of consequences in the statute.

Really the only place NCLB is "tough" (and this toughness is what essentially makes it the major step forward in civil rights that it is) is that it really insists that consequences be applied when poor, minority, and/or disabled students are not making academic progress in reading and math with their peers. The states and districts can have all the "nuance" they want above and beyond, but they can't rig their accountability systems to ignore or fail to act on this baseline expectation of equity. That is why the law is called "No Child Left Behind."

You say you are committed to closing the achievement gaps. If that is true, you will not weaken this basic feature of NCLB.

Greater differentiation or use of growth along the lines of the steps Secretary Spellings made, fine. Other reasonable fixes, fine. But when fixes become "loosening" or weakening," you will go down a path that you will regret.

I predict that, whatever euphemism you give it and however many carrots you create with increased spending, if you weaken the accountability provisions of NCLB, we will see a serious falloff in achievement for students, particularly disadvantaged students. This will be bad for you and those who go along with these polcies, even worse for the country, but certainly worst for those students whose progress the ESEA was created in the first place to promote.

I am not clear, as to Eliza's question this morning, about whether the politics will support reauthorization in 2010. But, whatever the calculus, I can possibly see a product that reflects greater spending along with greater accountability and choice. What I can't see is greater spending with less accountability and choice. That formula is both bad politics and bad policy.

For what it's worth, my advice is to spend 2010 sticking to, and learning from, deployment of RttT and other "carrots." You're on the right track. Make your current program work well. That's plenty tough enough duty.

Then - lessons learned, a coalition built, and elections over - perhaps a solid reauthorization could be achieved in 2011.

But - mark my words - a reauthorization that emasculates the accountability of NCLB will not only be a huge mistake; it will counter and ruin all the worthwhile work you're doing.

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As a former teacher, I have always believed that education and economic opportunity go hand in hand. The President has proposed an additional $4 billion in federal education funding for our students, an increase of 6.2 percent. This includes the largest single-year request for primary and secondary education funding in history, and a $1.35 billion increase in ‘Race to the Top’ competitive grants - a clear commitment to our nation’s children. I believe the best way to prepare our youth for professional success and strengthen our workforce is to provide every child with a quality education and I applaud the President for his commitment.

As we continue our work to improve education for our nation’s children, I believe we have a great opportunity to move forward in a bipartisan manner with a reauthorization of ESEA. I am anxious to begin and look forward to working with my House and Senate colleagues and other stakeholders on this important legislation. By investing in education, we are not only benefiting individual students, we are investing in the future economic success of our nation.

Policies: There is growing bipartisan consensus around important reforms such as increasing the number of high quality charter schools, changing approaches to human capital (including pay for performance), and focusing aggressive interventions with the lowest performing schools. But far trickier and more difficult is getting consensus around a new accountability framework to replace AYP -- how much should student growth versus student proficiency be a factor in judging school performance? Could states add other measures and if so, how should they be included so as to not water down accountability? What performance levels trigger various interventions or rewards? What are the appropriate roles of the Federal government versus state governments in setting these measures and interventions? The point is that the core accountability framework at the heart of ESEA could be very contentious.

Politics: This year brings an unusual political dynamic beyond the Congressional midterms. More than 36 states will hold gubernatorial elections. Whatever the Administration releases as its ESEA reauthorization blueprint will become a political issue at the state level with candidates forced to determine their position on thorny issues such as pay for performance, common standards, accountability, and the role of Federal government in education. There is always a healthy debate about the role of Federal education policy with states, but that debate may be intensified this year as a result of the political races.

Priorities: The top priority of both Congress and the Administration will be the economy, which is entirely appropriate. Thirty six states report significant holes in their budgets with more than 23 projecting a $69 billion gap for FY 2012. Job growth is considerably weaker and unemployment significantly higher then originally forecasted. The underemployment rate of 17.3 percent is one of the highest on record since 1994.

The ARRA, with its recently revised upward cost estimate of $862 billion, was suppose to help address these economic weaknesses and pave the way for Congress to tackle domestic policy reforms such as ESEA in 2010. But ARRA has only had a modest effect at stabilizing, much less improving, the economy because most of the programs weren't designed to stimulate the economy as much as advance policies important to the Administration in education, healthcare, and energy. For example, ARRA included Race to the Top which promotes aggressive and needed education reforms but doesn't award a single selection criteria point to jobs created. Good education policy, but not so good economic policy. As a result, there's growing pressure for Congress to pass a third stimulus.

And while ESEA reauthorization may top Secretary Duncan's 2010 agenda, it is remarkably absent from any of the President's speeches. President Obama gave two education speeches in January but neither called for reauthorization much less for one in 2010. Many education reformers were expecting the State of the Union to have a major ESEA section but were disappointed when the President just said "when we renew" as if conceding that it will happen at some point, just not this year. In addition, the White House press corps has asked Robert Gibbs throughout most of January what the Administration's priorities are after healthcare reform. ESEA wasn't mentioned once.

Even if the Administration included ESEA as one of its top priorities, it is not clear that Congress has the bandwidth to tackle it given the difficulty in resuscitating healthcare reform or passing a stripped down health insurance reform package. Congress must also jumpstart the stalled 2009 priorities such as financial regulatory reform, cap-and-trade, and SAFRA.

Process: A bipartisan reauthorized ESEA will require a commitment to using a process that is truly bipartisan and brings both Republicans and Democrats to the table. The Administration and Congress can't use the same approach used for the stimulus and healthcare reform, which will only guarantee more partisan gridlock. Such an effort must be led by the President who should use the budget this week to issue a set of broad principles that can frame the discussions and debate around accountability, human capital reform, and turning around low performing schools. The "Big Eight" then need to work together to develop a package that can secure bipartisan support in both chambers. This isn't impossible. It is the same process President Bush and Congress used in 2001 for a reauthorized ESEA package that became No Child Left Behind.

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I certainly hope so…but only if it is a law worth passing. The good news is, the current law does not expire and no reauthorization is needed to continue the accountability reforms currently embodied in NCLB. Any new law must be a step toward more -- not less -- robust accountability for schools in order to ensure every child is well educated. Talk of “loosening” the intensity for schools to do better is worrisome when half of the minority students in the country fail to graduate from high school on time and states continue to look for ways to skirt the law as evidenced by the more than 40 waivers given to states to avoid Title I compliance on the parent choice and tutoring provisions.

President Obama is off to a good start with amazing levels of funding for schools and with his encouraging rhetoric. As President Bush did in each State of the Union Address he gave, the President is right to use that opportunity to encourage Congress to take action on education. But it will take much more than that.

Any additional funds for education must be paired with higher expectations – not just in the way of higher curriculum standards but a real willingness to confront chronic school failure and reluctant educators. The one test the Obama administration has had has been dispiriting to reformers. In the debate over DC Choice, the administration sided with adults, not children.

Politically, it is unlikely that Congressional support for a reform-oriented bill will occur without significant bipartisan support. Too many Democrats are too close to the employee groups and other vested stakeholders of the system and likewise, too many Republicans have railed against the existence of the U.S. Department of Education and a robust federal role in education.

No Child Left Behind passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 87 to 10 in late 2001. In the House, the vote was 381 to 41. That incredible margin took hard work and strong leadership from President Bush, Congressman John Boehner, Senator Judd Gregg, Congressman George Miller, and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. When President Bush ran for President in 2000, No Child Left Behind was one of the major planks in his campaign platform. President Bush campaigned all over the country in support of it and in the process ran with (and brought aboard) many Republican members of Congress who were on the ballot with him. On the Democratic side of the aisle, Congressman Miller and Senator Kennedy knew that to stand for civil rights meant standing for accountability in education for poor and minority students. It was an amazing political alignment that involved key compromises on both sides for the greater good of a strong education law aimed at helping all children succeed.

Do we have that same alignment now? The truth is, we don’t know. The political groundwork has not yet been laid. Can the groundwork be laid quickly enough to enact a good law this year? Is there shared political and policy will around the key features of NCLB-like annual assessment, disaggregated data, a real and meaningful timeline and serious consequences for failure that include options for parents? I don’t know, but I hope so, and more than that, I will do all I can to help make the case for a new law, a stronger law, a law that really leaves no child behind and prepares every child for success in life in our globally competitive world.

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