First, let me agree with Judith Brown-Dianis’ point that Title I is essential to schools with high concentrations of children living in poverty as a way to counter historic school funding inequities. However, my interpretation of the question is that it talks about expectations and opportunities and outcomes for our investments. President Obama is suggesting that we target our funds at programs that expect students to read, write, communicate, solve problems and compute at a level that will enable them to be successful in college or career when they leave high school. And there’s a lot of data that says that’s the right thing to do. So why wouldn’t we tie high expectations with funds that are targeted to assist schools with high levels of poverty?

Clearly, permitting an environment of low expectations for students in high-poverty schools is unacceptable. In fact, in our work, we’ve learned that when expectations in high-poverty schools are raised, academic rigor is introduced, and long-term support and guidance are part of the equation, we’ve seen tremendous results. Graduation rates rise and those graduates seek post-secondary education more often. Drop-out rates decline.

At the very least, we should expect all students to be able to read and compute at a level that will allow them to succeed and even flourish in a 21st-century environment.

It’s interesting to note research by the International Center on Leadership in Education across 16 different careers found that “the reading requirements for entry-level jobs are higher than for many intermediate- and advanced-level jobs because of the technical nature of the reading done in many entry-level jobs. Perhaps even more surprising, entry-level job reading requirements exceed the reading requirements of all but the most technical college coursework.”

That’s backed up by anecdotal and research-based evidence from business, education and government that tell us a student’s ability to read is the key to success after high school -- in the workplace and higher education. And so again I ask: Why wouldn’t we tie the funds that are targeted to assist schools with high levels of poverty to high expectations?

The tsunami is upon us, and when we consider a history of failed alternatives, the answer to the question becomes clearer.

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"People are drawn to existing competitions like moths to a flame. It's precisely the wrong way to succeed. Do you go to trade shows or enter markets or submit RFPs or push for a GPA or even gross ratings points because there's a list of winners or because it's what you actually want to do? Most bestseller lists and prizes measure popularity, not effectiveness." -- Seth Godin

Thanks, Ms. Sattler, for bringing up the “multiple paths” problem with common standards. I missed that one in my post, and it really is the most often-encountered practical concern that my clients and I experience when we are forced to teach to standards.

Making sure that kids succeed is really not a problem for me at this point in my career. But making them all jump through the same hoops, the same way, at the same time, never seems to work, and ultimately, I feel I must advise people to go back—very quietly, of course—to effective teaching, precisely the kind that helps kids exceed standards without our actually having to follow them.

In my review of the literature, I have seen nothing in the theory of educational standards requring that they actually be taught. Kids can easily master the knowledge and skills that standards represent, and teachers can instruct them efficiently toward this end, without anyone ever knowing what the standards are.

As you rightly note, there are many paths from here to there. And the we way create and apply standards in the classroom and on tests does not, as yet, allow for this simple truth. While I am aware of several rather elegant solutions to this problem, I always seem to get in trouble when I bring them up.

My “thesis” about reform, in general, and standards, in particular, is that we are simply not yet mature enough as a nation to implement something like this on such a large scale—much less to tie important funding to its outcome.

Thanks for putting on the table one more crucial piece of the puzzle. College-readiness standards are very different from career-readiness standards. In fact, if you read Seth Godin's new book on career and life success, you will discover as I did that there’s a sharp argument to be made that in the new economy the very traits that make a person likely to succeed in college are precisely those that may make that same person miserable in their career.

Along with my attempts to digest this bit of startling thought leadership by one of the most brilliant business minds of our age, I’ve noticed that our entire nation seems to have forgotten that school is not job training. As I mentioned in my post, I don’t see any “citizenship-ready” standards anywhere. Although I bet Ms. Ravitch mentions something like this somewhere in her new book.

My question to you—and really it’s just the same question I’ve been asking myself for the last 15 years—is this: In recognizing the obvious power of standards to do good, why are we, as a nation, so reluctant to discuss the equally obvious power of standards to do harm? Asking the hard questions up front is the only way to answer them up front—and to keep them from biting us in the rear later on.

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For over a decade, the states have been required to establish core content standards in order to receive Title 1 funds. So tying future receipt of Title 1 funding to yet another, albeit different, set of mandated curriculum standards is nothing new

What would be new -- and path breaking -- would be to finally link Title 1 to a clear set of "opportunity to learn" standards, the now almost forgotten third leg of the standards based reform stool. This, in turn, would require Title 1 be conditioned on the states providing "fair" school funding, i.e., a sufficient level of state and local revenue for all students to achieve the required content standards, with more funding to high poverty districts with greater student and school need. Now, only a few states even approach passing this test.

And let's be clear. Tinkering around the edges by improving the distribution of Title 1 among schools within districts won't do much, especially in states like Tennessee, Illinois or Louisiana that notoriously under fund public education and provide less funding to higher poverty districts. Title 1 is just too small to have any real equity effect on the underlying level and allocation of state and local revenue through the state finance formulas. Besides, just moving existing funding among schools when their district is severely shortchanged by the state is another "rearranging the deck chairs" exercise.

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Cheryl L. Sattler, Senior Partner at Ethica, LLC, submitted the following:

College and career-ready are two different goals, and essentially require two different sets of standards. Some students will go on to four-year colleges and become professionals, while other students will pursue post-high school technical training. The skill sets for these are different, as are the course and prerequisite requirements. It’s important to acknowledge that there are different paths; students who pursue vocational training have long been neglected in public policy discussions. One report named them “the forgotten half.”

I don’t consider college-ready to be better than career-ready, but I know that others feel differently. There also are financial implications – earnings data show that college graduates do make more money over their lifetimes. The choice to pursue a career versus college matters. One question that occurs to me when thinking about how these standards will impact not the policy arena, but the individual student, is who will make the choice of which standards apply to which students, and when. Do college and career-ready standards reach down to the sixth grade? The eighth? Without careful thought and oversight, a multi-level standards system has the potential to make decisions about individual students’ futures. Students are different. They do need multiple paths. But we have had many versions of tracking in education over the years. We track students both formally and through our expectations for them. The danger with tracking comes when those choices about which path a student should pursue are made on the basis of race, or ethnic origin, family income, language skills, or other characteristics that do not take into account a student’s dreams and potential.

Common standards can be very powerful, in equalizing the educational expectations across state lines. But as with many educational innovations, we’ll need to guard against unintended consequences.

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Perhaps the most valuable lesson I have learned in my life is that everyone really is doing the best they can all the time. There’s no more powerful lever of compassion than this simple idea, and compassion is the most important tool we have for making good decisions on behalf of others.

So even though I wish our President and our Secretary of Education were offering us a policy supported by solid research and a carefully considered theory of action, I accept the fact that a competitive approach to the allocation of Title I funding is, by definition, the best that they—and therefore, we—can do.

Mr. Finn and Ms. Ravitch point out quite rightly that we may be jumping the gun by attaching Title I funds to the adoption of standards that don’t yet exist. This seems quite reasonable.

By contrast, Mr. Vander Ark is ready to rock and roll. This is also reasonable, especially when we acknowledge that the only other outcome might be a Republican freeze-out during reauthorization—though I was encouraged to learn this week that this is now considered slightly less likely than some of us thought.

Mr. Kress, a cautious optimist in this case, has reasonable questions along with the wisdom to know that posing them all is unnecessary, and that a “wait and see” approach is probably in order. He also rightly points out that smart people are working hard on the sticky issues that remain to be addressed, and that not having all the answers is not a justification for holding things up.

Mr. Rothstein correctly points out that there’s more to boosting achievement than creating standards. Ms. Guisbond warns that the entire enterprise might be hampered when political theory clashes with classroom practice. And Ms. Browne-Dianis argues passionately for addressing the inequities of the past before moving ahead with the policies of the future.

Finally, we have an excellent lesson on the history of Title I from Ms. Sattler who points out just how easy it is for a well-intentioned policy to undermine its own mission with the inclusion of poorly understood provisions whose negative effects are easily amplified by selective enforcement.

As is so often the case in this forum, everyone has smart things to say. And even though well-reasoned opposition to the President’s proposed Title I policy clearly exists, it’s also clear that the train has already left the station and that anyone who doesn’t get on board will be left behind. Some folks may be powerful enough to let the train leave without them. Others may be young enough to wait for the next train to come along in 15 or 20 years. Me? I’m neither young nor powerful, but I think, for the moment, I’m going to stand on the platform and try to reason a few things out.

(NOTA BENE: This post is even longer than my usual too-long posts, and it is filled with ideas I’ve never heard anyone discuss. If you’re looking for a different perspective, you’ve come to the right place. And if much of what I say is simply wrong, I’d really appreciate any feedback you might have on my thinking. Like most educators, I have at times been completely flummoxed by our nation’s approach to reform. This is just another one of those times.)

Instead of agreeing or disagreeing with anyone here, or even with President Obama’s policy (which seems about the same as every other education policy we’re running these days), I’m going to hop onto a different track entirely by attempting to show that all three elements of this issue—Title I, competitive funding, and “college-and career-readiness” standards—are each slightly flawed but also easily fixed.

That being said, I have immense respect for the people who have weighed in so far, and I believe they are all correct to some degree. Education policy at this time seems like a foregone conclusion. And since I’m one of those people on the bottom who gets to work with whatever the folks at the top come up with, I think the best I can do here is try to understand what will happen in the future and how teachers, kids, and other people like me will be affected.

It seems to me that the most likely outcomes of the President’s policy will be the same five outcomes we have ended up with in the past: (1) Progress in our thinking about the effectiveness or lack thereof of certain reform strategies; (2) Increased federal power and influence over the states; (3) Inconclusive results in the area of student achievement; (4) Increased influence by philanthropic and private interests attending to matters our government seems unable or unwilling to address; and (5) The “revenge of unintended consequences.” (See Edward Tenner’s brilliant book, “Why Things Bite Back” if you like that turn of phrase, or if you’re interested in why technology might not be such a great thing for school kids under certain circumstances.)

The reason we will keep getting these same five results is because we keep taking the same actions: aggressively implementing unproven reforms under inhospitable conditions of our own creation that further diminish the likelihood of success. I guess you could call this the “Pogo Principle of Education Policy and Politics”.

I readily admit that I am still heavily influenced by Mr. Finn’s recent article regarding the “end stage” nature of Reform 1.0. And though he did not make this next assertion in his piece, it is my belief that the source of our greatest challenges in education can be found in the fact that we prefer to create change with unproven ideas supported by a shaky platform rather than moving forward more deliberately with good science and a stronger foundation based on useful information, uncompromising transparency, and dynamic communities.

To set the stage for my discussion, I will quote Mr. Finn from today’s “Education Gadfly”:

“Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low. “Accountability” has turned to test-cramming and bean-counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills. That emphasis, in turn, has diverted what was already weak-kneed attention to history, literature, art, etc. Efforts to rectify the “basic skills” problem have led to the folly of “21st Century skills” rather than a solid liberal arts curriculum. Textbooks, by and large, suck. NCLB has brought as many problems as solutions. Technology has wrought no miracles. Teacher education, with rare exceptions, is still appalling. Charter schools are uneven at best…. A lot of innovations and reforms, meant to solve the underlying achievement problem, have failed to do so—hence our essentially-flat test scores and graduation rates these past three decades—and some have had malign side effects.”

No wonder I’ve been feeling a little blue these past ten years or so.

At the same time, I really do believe that everyone is doing the best they can, so I conclude that our country must be doing the best that it can, and that I can do the best that I can by not being so afraid all the time to talk about what I see and feel in schools and classrooms all across our country—even when my opinions run counter to those of the prevailing powers in education today.

With absolute sincerity, I say again that I know that everyone is doing the best they can. I just wish we could all do a little better by taking a little time to understand how our system of education is likely to respond to the changes we have in store for it.

For those of us who work in schools, it’s relatively easy to predict how the pinball of policy will bounce around the machine. By examining the theory of action inherent in a given idea, one can often determine, even before that idea is implemented, how well it will work. The way we’re going about creating, adopting, applying, and spinning our “college- and career-readiness” standards is well worth studying in this regard.

When it comes to “college- and career-readiness” standards most Americans seem to want them as soon as possible. But I think the possible will take a little longer. For one thing, it isn’t clear that even when these standards are in place throughout the land that we will end up with what we want.

We don’t actually want the standards; we want kids who are prepared to succeed in college, in the world of work, and in their communities as productive citizens. But if there’s one thing about standards that has been proven time and again, it’s the existence of a gap between intention and result, a gap that is easily traced to a state’s manipulation of test creation, test scoring, or test administration—a gap that makes a mockery of the already-mockable notion of minimum competence. (The fact that we manifest our standards in terms of minimum competence, as opposed to maximum potential, is also a serious problem but one best left for another day.)

Secretary Duncan has railed against this phenomenon that I have dubbed “rigor mortis” many times, but he has yet to propose any ideas that would address it. I trust Mr. Kress—always a straight shooter in my experience—when he says that smart people are working on issues like this. But I’ve been peaking behind the curtain just a bit lately and not only have I not seen the Wizard, I haven’t even seen his big smoke machine.

Since this problem has the potential to undermine the entire standards movement—and to undercut accountability once again as well—I would expect to see many solutions on the table by now. Let us not forget that this exact problem was predicted by the anti-NCLB crowd ten years ago, and codified in 1976 by social science researcher Donald T. Campbell. Even for a tough problem like this one, I think 34 years is a long time to go without a solution. I mean, honestly, it’s a cliché to say this, but we sent a man to the Moon in far less time.

While I am personally aware of solutions to this problem, I see none with any support from the current administration or from politicians on either side of the aisle. And this is merely one reason why I am completely baffled by national education policy at this time. Improving standards without improving testing isn’t just putting the cart before the horse; it’s condemning the horse to the glue factory.

But I remind myself that everyone is doing the best they can, so if we can’t solve this problem, I will accept that not solving it is indeed the best that we can do. And that even if I think we can do better with a few small changes, I know that my advocacy in this regard has no constituency because as a nation we have decided to implement our favorite ideas without the planning they deserve, thus producing blunt instruments which often hurt as many people as they help. At some point in the future, it is my hope that we remain just as active in our attempts to improve our schools, but that a little more of our activity will be devoted to thoughtful investigations of the immensely complex issues before us and the development of elegant and more precise solutions.

This lack of precision can be found even in education policy reports by some of our country’s most respected organizations.

The Achieve study, recommended by our editor, apparently notes that more than half the states already possess “college- and career-readiness” standards. But I’m not sure how this can be so. “College- and career-readiness” are applied concepts. As such, they cannot be validated until they have been tested under real-world conditions. Even if a state had standards that it thought defined “college- and career-readiness”, it would have no way of knowing whether it actually possessed such standards, and how well those standards were working, until several years worth of its high school students had succeeded in college and careers. This may sound like a needless nit to pick, a facetious round of semantic jousting, but it goes to something much more important that I will discuss below—the difference between rhetoric and reality and why this popular catch-phrase may be more than empty alliteration and instead turn out to be the linchpin of reform.

In the wake of consistent pre-announcements of new and improved standards, I have become interested yet again in how we create them. We have a great way of creating standards in the classroom, an approach my organization calls “Model-Criteria-Strategy”, or “MCS” for short. (My company also uses this approach in our corporate consulting where, indeed, it is a smash hit! This gives business leaders hope that we are, in fact, teaching kids useful things in school. FYI: The business people I know couldn’t give a fig about standards or test scores; what they want are knowledgeable, skillful, self-motivated employees—or failing that, more H-1B visas.)

In my organization’s “MCS” approach to standards, we start first with a high-quality real-world model. We show this model to the kids and work with them to define, in language they can understand, what makes the model good. These criteria become the standards we want kids to meet. To us, these standards represent an effective translation from high-concept educationese into meaningful information young people and their teachers can readily understand and internalize. Finally, we teach specific techniques—the “Strategy” part of “MCS”—for reproducing the traits that make the model good.

By applying the strategies to create the model, the students’ work embodies the traits, and this is how we and they know the standards have been met. The approach is concrete, valid, authentic, meaningful, research-proven, and above all, honest and transparent. Kids seem to respond to it very well. Teachers like it, too, because it simplifies their work, clarifies their charge, and saves a lot of time and energy.

Perhaps the best thing about this approach is that it’s hard to screw up. As long as we start with a high-quality real-world model, teachers and students always have an easy way of interpreting the standards and of knowing what to do to meet them. The model captures the “expertise” we want kids to develop and provides an ideal guide to instruction. In this sense, even if neither the teacher nor the students knows exactly how to proceed, everyone can learn together using the model as a map, the criteria as a collection of landmarks, and the strategies as simple step-by-step directions. Because the model is authentic and of high-quality, the skills kids develop are authentic and of high-quality. In this way, even kids who don’t fully meet the standards still acquire valuable real-world knowledge and skills, albeit to a lesser degree than we might hope.

The “MCS” process—though it is not termed as such outside of our little company—embodies the accepted research-based approach for creating standards in the classroom. But it isn’t the process we use for creating standards at state and national levels. When we create state or national standards, we skip the real-world models entirely and begin instead with the language. This has never made sense to me.

For one thing, we already know that “MCS” works. We also know that just about everyone has trouble figuring out exactly what the standards mean when they have only words to work with. More importantly, I believe standards-based reform would enjoy more support, and more success, if it were handled with more integrity. Currently, most of the people I talk to are either suspicious of the venture or utterly bored with it. Among other things, this is patently unfair to the standards-makers who are, like everyone else, doing the best that they can.

So how can this situation be improved? The easiest thing would be to use the best people and the best methodology.

Our nation’s all-star team for creating college-ready standards could include the current crop of Ron Clarks, Raif Esquiths, and Jamie Escalantes, along with their university doppelgangers. These would be our nation’s most successful teachers, the people most likely to understand what kids know and are able to do, and how best to help them know and be able to do it. We don’t just need good teachers here, or even great ones. We need the very best our country has to offer. I do not say this to criticize anyone who has been involved in standards creation. I say it simply to emphasize the fact that incredible amounts of time, money, and effort must be expended to support standards, and so it makes sense to be as certain as possible that we are putting our best foot forward when we create them.

On the career side, we could recruit folks like Seth Godin, John Challenger, Daniel Goleman, Thomas Friedman, and Richard Nelson Bolles (the “What Color is Your Parachute?” guy). These are the people in our society who seem to know the most about what it takes to succeed in the world of work.

Putting the best “real world” folks in the same room with the best “school world” folks might elicit the perfect synthesis of academic and authentic ideals we all crave. In truth, we should also add a third group headed up by our greatest historians, our most eminent social scientists, and our most influential non-elected civic leaders. These people would create standards for the third “C” of “citizenship.” After all, so many of us say that education is more than mere job training. Why not match our rhetoric with the reality of “citizenship-readiness,” too?

With the right teams in place, the next thing I’d do is find the right models. One of the reasons why educational standards seem odd at times is that they are created in an odd way. If I wanted to create a standard for something, I would first look for high-quality examples of that thing in the world. This is where we start in the classroom, with the “Model” part of the “MCS” approach. So if I wanted to know what “college-readiness” was, for example, I might survey 100 or even 1000 college students who had been successful in their freshman year, and create a model based on their real-world examples.

By combining student self-assessments with the assessments of their professors, information from their high school teachers, and simple metrics like high school grade point averages and SAT/ACT scores, patterns would emerge that would help us create a real-world model of the college-ready student. From there, it would be a snap to define, in the language of educational standards, exactly what the term “college-readiness” really meant.

The nice thing about this method is that it is grounded in reality rather than in theory, politics, conjecture, ideology, or the naturally skewed opinions of a small group of intelligent and well-intentioned human beings. This approach also guarantees that when a larger group of people reviews the work of the smaller group of poeple, the standards don’t become watered down or otherwise comprised. Worst case scenario, anyone who doubted the validity of the standards could refer back to the real-world model upon which they were based. Future versions could easily be created by repeating our research and updating the model by studying a new batch of successful college freshman. Best of all, teachers, parents, and the general public would come to realize that standards-makers really were doing the very best that they could do. And, by virtue of the increased transparency that models afford, far fewer people would feel shut out of the process the way so many do now.

A similar approach could be taken to determine “career-readiness” standards. For example, I know several successful young people who entered the world of work right out of high school. One is my travel agent. Another is a successful technology entrepreneur. Kids like these, who left high school and quickly became successful in rewarding careers, would serve as excellent models for national “career-readiness” standards. And once again, as the world of work was altered by developments in national or global economic trends, we would merely have to repeat the research and update our language based on a contemporary real-world model.

Finding real-world models for “citizenship-readiness” standards might take some head-scratching, but I’ll bet our all-star panel of real-world citizenship experts could figure out what to do. As Mr. Kress reminds us, we have many smart people available to help us answer the difficult questions. And that’s absolutely true. We have more brainpower focused on fixing education now than at any other time in our history. Unfortunately for me, this is precisely why I get frustrated when so few reform ideas are discussed, explored, researched, funded, or piloted. I believe in good old-fashioned American know-how. I just wish we were making more use of it when it came to the creation and execution of state and national education policy.

Now here’s where the rhetoric versus reality bit starts to matter. Even though standards experts implore educators to teach the standards they create through concrete models and modeling techniques, the standards-makers themselves do not use this approach. I have always thought of this as the “Do as I say, not as I do” phenomenon. I use it myself. But only on difficult kids in difficult classroom situations, and only as a last resort because it requires the expenditure of significant social capital. This round of standards-makers risks the same significant expense. As a result, even the best standards we’ve ever created may suffer the same fate as the poorer standards they are intended to replace.

The way standards are created may also explain why they’re often so difficult for non-educators to understand, so challenging for teachers to implement, and so hard for parents to support. The language employed lacks a real-world referent, so who’s to say exactly what a given standard means in terms of real-world knowledge and skills? The teachers who have to implement these standards often can’t tease out their meaning. And even some standards-setting bodies themselves end up at a loss to explain their work in the years following its completion.

Furthermore, the tests we create to measure these standards end up being based on theories about the knowledge and skills the average student might have rather than on actual knowledge and skills successful students do have. Ironically, it is the tests, created at the very end of the process, that become the de facto models that the standards attempt to describe. This is backwards and dangerous, perhaps another reason why we are still unsure about what our standards-based tests really measure, and why so few respected researchers and prize-winning policy wonks rely on the results of state-created standards-based instruments to support important conclusions.

So if we consider that we might not be creating standards in the best way possible, we must face the unpleasant possibility that the standards may not lead us where we want to go. Throw in the “race to the bottom” problem where states are encouraged to lower their cut scores for passing their own standardized tests (a problem that will likely get even worse if somehow Title I funds become tied to test scores), and it seems like we’re right back where we started, but in a bigger boat taking on more water and with barely a teaspoon to do the bailing.

A simple solution to many of our problems with regard to standards would be national testing. Indeed, we already know this works because the only tests we trust are national tests like the NAEP, SAT, and ACT. What these instruments have in common, and why we like them better than state tests, tells us exactly what we need to do to fix testing, shore up standards, and restore faith in accountability: (1) They are created, administered, and scored by organizations that do not have a direct financial or political interest in how children or schools perform; (2) They are not based on publicly-available standards; (3) They are regarded as appropriately rigorous; (4) The SAT and ACT are actually used by colleges to partially define “college-readiness”; and (5) They are not so easily “gamed”. Other than short prep courses, teaching to these tests doesn’t seem to be very popular, very effective, or, in the case of the NAEP, even possible.

What has always interested me most in this area is that none of these tests was created by a state and that none is based on an explicit set of publicly-available educational standards. I conclude from this that neither states nor standards are required for the creation of reliable educational measurement systems. Still, if we have to have standards—and we do, if for no other reason than almost everyone thinks we do—then we might as well have them in fine working order.

So, does tying Title I money to the adoption of “college- and career-readiness” standards make sense? That depends on whether the standards themselves make sense, whether the current theory of competitive educational funding makes sense, and whether the Title I program itself makes sense. I have a gut feeling that all three of these thing are just a bit off the mark, and that this triple-threat combination is even farther from the bullseye.

At the same time, I don’t think anyone in particular need be singled out for any of this. I really do believe it is the best that we can do, and that the people doing it are doing the best they can. I just wish our best was a little bit better, and I feel all the time these days that it can be without any more effort or cost than we are currently expending. It seems to me that better ideas are readily available, and I don’t understand why we don’t avail ourselves of them.

Standards would work better if they were created from real-world models. Competitive funding would work better if balancing mechanisms existed to assure that losers would one day become winners (see the analogy to professional sports below). Title I could easily be fixed (while preserving the traditional funding model) simply by closing the loophole described by Ms. Brown, improving enforcement of long-standing regulations, and paying a little more attention to how the money was spent. Finally, increased transparency in each of these areas could accelerate system-wide improvement dramatically. In theory, we in America are proud of our ed reform policies but in practice we seem ashamed of how they actually operate. This unwarranted and unfortunate secrecy dampens our success and threatens our progress.

So while I’ve never been a fan of the Title I program, I know how many schools depend on Title I money in order to survive. Taking Title I funds away from schools that have come to depend on them will probably only hurt our neediest kids. Perhaps this is mere collateral damage, but damage it is just the same, and I’m not ashamed to say that it makes me uncomfortable.

I find it hard to believe that a “reverse Robin Hood” strategy will make Title I better or Title I schools more effective. What would make Title I better is more transparency about how schools spend their money, what gains they achieve as a result of that spending, and how the most successful 100% Title I schools use their Title I resources. Hasn’t IES published a study called “Best Practices in the Use of Title I Funding?” And if they have, couldn’t we at least require school leaders to thumb through the pages?

President Obama has made it clear that he feels the federal government should invest only in reforms that work. That’s a great idea—assuming we know which reforms those are. But then, we don’t know, do we? This is one justification for the competitive grant approach in the first place, is it not?

RttT, i3, and now Title I will all be used like venture capital to seed the field and to nurture the most promising ideas. Some will work better than others, and these will be dubbed “reforms that work.” Then we will make more people use these reforms by threatening to withhold their funding if they don’t.

The appealing part of this, I guess, is that it parallels a common practice parents use to train their children. The problem, as most child psychologists will tell you, is that it doesn’t work very well in the long run. Kids appear to comply when parents are watching and threats are imminent. But compliance is superficial at best and utterly absent when threats are removed. Most of what these reward-and-punishment-driven kids learn over the years is how to game the system or—even worse—how to exact revenge on the people who used their power to manipulate them in the first place.

Still, we love competition in America. And I do think this administration may have struck gold with competitive funding as the education policy model of the future, just like the previous administration succeeded in popularizing accountability. It just seems innately right, in a Manifest Destiny sort of way, that schools and states should compete for resources and that those who use them best should be rewarded with more of the same—especially if these resources can be taken away from those who appear to be squandering them, thus rendering the concept of competitive Title I funding more politically popular by virtue of its being undisputably revenue neutral. Better yet, this “feed the rabbits, starve the snails” approach feels fair and just to many taxpayers.

But the goal of education policy is not the creation of rabbits and snails. We have too many snails already. The goal of education policy is to make rabbits out of everyone.

Another simple truth is that competition guarantees the existence of well-defined winners and losers. But since the losers in education are behind by many touchdowns already, it’s hard to see how penalizing them back to their own end zone will encourage them to do anything other than punt.

It’s also hard to imagine that the current field of winners or losers will change very much over time. After a certain point, what incentive will the winners have to get better? And once the losers fall hopelessly far behind, why would they suddenly decide to pull themselves up by their own bedraggled bootstraps? At first, competition makes the rabbits run faster. But it doesn’t make the snails run like rabbits.

Since the administration has already decided which reforms will be funded, and because it only invests in reforms that work, apparently it knows which reforms these are (though it didn’t know this just a few paragraphs ago; hang with me and I’ll explain how this works). States that have implemented these reforms have already been anointed as successes. For all practical purposes then, a national consensus has already been reached regarding reforms that work and the “winning” states that use them. Furthermore, since we know already which reforms work, we obviously have no need for competitive grants? If we know what works, then everybody does it. End of story. NCLB forced all states to create testing systems. What not simply mandate “reforms that work” in the same way? As distasteful as this might be to states’ rights folks, it’s certainly more efficient and, most importantly, more equitable.

But here’s the really weird thing: the fact that we have RttT, i3, and the possibility of the competitive allocation of Title I funds proves that we do not know which reforms work. In fact, some of the biggest fans of RttT and i3 have suggested postponing reauthorization of the ESEA until successful programs emerge and we discover what works. By definition, then, we are not investing in “reforms that work”, we are investing in reforms that may or may not work. This isn’t inherently wrong. But refusing to admit it isn’t going to secure the trust of the general public or inspire the five million or so adults who have to make potentially unworkable reforms work in their schools.

Why is all this significant? Because it’s counter-productive to base policy on one thesis (“We’re only going to invest in reforms that work.”), and then apply a different thesis (“We’re not exactly sure which reforms work so let’s wait and see which ones do.”), and then justify everything with yet another thesis (“We’re going to take money away from the poorest schools in the poorest states that fail to apply proven reforms—even if those reforms aren’t yet proven—and give that money to states and schools that do apply proven reforms—even if those reforms aren’t yet proven.”)

Perhaps I’m being unreasonable, naïve, coy, or a little bit of all three. But honestly, folks, these are the questions that keep me up at night, and if I don’t write them down somewhere, I never get back to sleep. (If you find yourself just now about to say something like, “Steve, take a chill pill and get a life!” I don’t blame you one bit. Most of the time these days, I feel much the same way.)

As far as I’m concerned, at this time there are no proven reforms. Testing isn’t proven, standards aren’t proven, charters aren’t proven, vouchers aren’t proven, performance-based pay isn’t proven, competitive funding isn’t proven, and the value of K-20 longitudinal data systems hasn’t even been assessed because I don’t think we have any K-20 longitudinal data systems yet to assess longitudinally. We think each of these things might work to some degree under some circumstances at some time. But in each case, the best that can be said is that the jury is still out and that we have more research yet to do.

Now, before you think I’m some kind of stick-in-the-mud, or a proud representative of the Party of “No”, please hear me out. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be trying all these things. I just think we ought to try them on a smaller scale, try them in the best way we know how, and study them thoroughly to make sure they work before we bet Reform 2.0 on the same set of hunches that seems to have doomed Reform 1.0. (Tip-o’-the-hat once again to Mr. Finn. I do wish more people would read his article and comment upon it in this forum. Perhaps there’s more nuance to his thesis than I have realized, but his message seems simple and clear to me—and full of important implications for discussions just like this one.)

When it comes to ed reform policies, it seems that many of us suffer from premature extrapolation. We get excited about an attractive idea and rush headlong, on waves of infatuation, into complicated relationships we are not yet mature enough to master. And people get hurt.

It’s true that things aren’t very good right now in our schools, and that doing nothing is not a responsible option. But neither is it responsible to pretend that unproven reforms and new approaches to policy are inherently correct, or that they won’t have serious negative consequences for many of our states, ours schools, and our children.

At the same time, there are many equally promising ideas available to us that we ignore. I suppose you could say that some are wallflowers, others a bit plain, and that a few just aren’t the kind you’d take home to meet your mother. But is reform really as neatly wrapped up now as our national policy seems to indicate? Are we really as cocky as we seem? What are the odds of marrying the girl you began holding hands with in the 7th grade? Yes, she was your first true love, and she will forever have a special place in your heart. But will she still feed you, (will she still need you), when you’re 64?

Our current love affair, of course, is with competition. But there’s a feeling I’ve had ever since we started talking about RttT that I had seen the end of this movie before it began. Despite the criticisms I have leveled on the program in this forum, I’m not inherently pre-disposed to hating RttT, competitive funding of public education, or even NCLB itself. I just haven’t heard anyone describe in detail a plausible theory of action for any of these approaches. It seems that we love to pre-announce each new policy debutante as the most important reform in history. But when it comes to thoughtful projections about a policy’s effect, our logic flies off faster than a prom dress.

In this regard, “competition” sounds a lot like “accountability” to me—same easy, intuitive justification, same shoddy, self-serving, simplistic analyses about how it will affect education. I was a big fan of accountability in the beginning, but my support was based on my naive assumption that it would work simply because I believed in the sincerity and intelligence of the people who developed it. (I still believe that everyone associated with NCLB was smart and sincere. But I now understand that possessing these laudable qualities isn’t enough to carry the day when we are faced with such complicated problems.)

Having spent the past few years studying our government’s theory of accountability in public education, I have realized that it is based on a flawed theory of action. In its present state it simply cannot be successful. And even if we do away with the much-derided “AYP”, I’m not sure it will work any better. Competition for funding in public education seems similarly off kilter. Perhaps it is yet another well-intentioned misapplication of a solid private sector concept to a squishy public sector problem. Private sector solutions are inherently attractive in a culture like ours where free-market capitalism is part of the national DNA. But policies based on these private sector principles often seem to me like square pegs trying to plug the irregularly-shaped holes of social sector challenges, at least where public education is concerned.

The theory that “competition makes things better” only makes sense if: (1) There are meaningful rewards for winning; (2) There are meaningful punishments for losing; and (3) Losers get the things they need to eventually become winners at some point in the future. (The Sox, The Saints, and The US Men’s Bobsledding Team notwithstanding, we really don’t want our schools to have to wait that long, do we?)

For example, the worst teams in a professional sports league typically receive the best draft choices for the coming season. This socialist notion increases parity, thus improving competition, and raising the aggregate level of ability for all teams over the long term. (The worst teams also get the easiest schedules in leagues like the NFL where not every team plays every other team every season.)

This tells me that there is an important tension to be maintained between the punishment associated with losing and the reward losers receive that gives them a chance to get better. Notice, too, that things like salary caps and revenue sharing—two other patently socialist policies—also improve competition in professional sports. Unfortunately, I see no mechanisms in our current approach to competitive education funding that would mimic these critical elements and sustain the all-important “balancing act” that improves parity by aiding the losers to a greater degree than the winners.

As an instructive corollary from education itself, sports leagues for young kids are constantly improving even without explicit balancing mechanisms. Why? Because coaching has improved so much. Kids’ coaches now have easy access through clinics, books, videos, etc., to the minds of professional coaches. Players have access to similar resources from professional players as well.

Kids’ coaches get better because they have a desire to help kids improve and because they have a generous supply of easily-attainable resources with which to better themselves. Institutional knowledge handed down from professional to amateur—not competition—fuels the improvement of kids’ sports and explains why your local high school football team probably runs the “Read Option” almost as well as Texas Tech.

The same is true in music and the other arts as well—especially in jazz education where direct professional influence has been a core component of both culture and curriculum in teaching since the 1970s. (When I was in high school between 1977 and 1981, I received in-person instruction from legends like Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Williams, Ernestine Anderson, Ray Brown, Mark Murphy, Diane Schuur, and even an ailing but no less memorable Count Basie). Music, drama, visual arts, etc., each of these areas has improved significantly in our schools, right along with improvements in athletics, for exactly the same reason: better instruction based on improved access to information about professional-level performance and training.

In each of these school “subjects,” aggregate ability has improved nationwide even though no significant federal, state, or local reforms have been used. This has happened not because of competition, but because of information, community, and transparency.

The reason information is so influential is because in this case it is practical and authentic; everyone knows it comes from the real world and that it therefore bears the imprimatur of society’s top experts. It also tells people “how” to do things not just “what” they should do.

(See my discussion of standards above and think again about why even superior standards may not be any more successful than the inferior ones they are designed to replace. Here’s a hint: of all the things we might seek to standardize in education, standardizing teaching and school leadership would probably lead to better results because we know from good research that better teachers and better leaders are the key catalysts of better learning. By contrast, the research-base for the large-scale use of curriculum standards in US public education is nowhere near as conclusive.)

The second element of better education policy is community. Community is powerful because it encourages the sharing of useful information and because it provides a true “social safety net” via the natural formation of an inspiring and sustaining “tribe,” as Seth Godin would call it. We desperately need more “tribes” in education. To see a great one in action, visit the English Companion on Ning. And while you’re there poking around, imagine what education in America would be like if we had about 10,000 groups like this. That sounds like a lot. But in this day and age, this degree of scaling could happen almost overnight—especially if a President and a Secretary of Education believed in it.

The third critical elemen in ed reform reform is transparency. Transparency is extremely important because, unlike in Algebra or English or AP Biology, just about anyone can watch a football practice or go to a game. Just about anyone can attend the Christmas concert or the spring JazzFest. Just about anyone can see the school musical. Perhaps most importantly, the kids can see us see them, too. Sharing your art with the people who matter most to you is the greatest motivator of all. This natural, internal accountability is far more powerful than any arbitrarily designed external accountability our government or any state can demand. And let’s not forget that we can all still get our free-market fix by attending public competitions where winners are anointed and losers are encouraged to fight again another day.

It would seem that not everything in education is broken. While we were blowing billions on Reading First, Lebron James was blowing away the nation as his senior year high school basketball games were televised on ESPN. What is going on in school sports and the arts that we can learn from? Perhaps it’s merely what is not going on: no tests, no standards, no charters, no vouchers, no merit pay, no longitudinal data systems. Just great information, almost perfect transparency, and the exponential power of tribes increased exponentially, of course, by Metcalfe’s Law.

Because the “coaches” and the “players” all know that they are always being watched, they tend to perform better simply because performing for an audience we care about seems to bring out the best in all of us. Many young athletes have also internalized the wisdom of self-improvement through self-competition. Track stars and swimmers seem particularly adept at racing themselves as opposed to always worrying about their competitors. In fact, many sports psychologists consider focusing on the competition to be a losing attitude.

The proven value of simple things like public performance and self-competition forms the foundation of many alternative assessment ideas proposed by people like David Berliner and others. I think these ideas might actually prove more promising in the long run than policies based on externally-imposed federal accountability and zero-sum competitive funding. At least in sports, music, and the other arts, a coherent theory of action exists—based on information, community, transparency, and then competition—a theory of action built not on old school business bromides and traditional capitalist metaphors, but on contemporary real-world structures and proven practices within public education itself.

I readily acknowledge that competition exists in school sports and the arts, but I assert that it is not the primary driver of quality or the all-important balancing mechanism that improves parity and makes competition a positive, rather than a negative, influence in the long run. That’s what information, community, and transparency achieve.

This suggests to me that policies focused on improving the amount of and access to quality information about professional-level teaching—and professional-level work within real-world disciplines—would be far more successful at this time than policies based on competition or curriculum standards. An explosion of authentic real-world wisdom handed down by our nation’s most revered educators would bring out the best in in everyone, bring new “tribes” into existence, and set a bold standard for transparency that both our government and its citizens could be proud of. After this transformation has occurred, policies based on competition and accountability would probably be more successful. Then again, we might not need competition or accountability at all by then. And we certainly wouldn’t need curriculum standards or standards-based tests, just as we have never needed them in sports or the arts.

Make no mistake, I am no defender of the status quo (except when it works), and I am certainly not an apologist for Title I. Nor am I predisposed to disdaining competition, testing, or educational standards.

From the standpoint of dollars spent versus achievement gained, Title I is a terrible program. It suffers from the same challenges inherent in most entitlement programs. It is, however, the education equivalent of the social safety net. It’s like Medicaid; and it really does matter to a lot of people, mostly those who lack the power to advocate effectively for changes in policy that might serve them better. Taking Title I money away from less progressive states and giving it to more progressive states is the rough equivalent of taking one person’s healthcare and using it to double up someone else’s. The true shame, however, is that fixing Title I would be a snap if we just applied the one-two-three punch of information, community, and transparency.

I suppose the argument in favor of competitive Title I funding is the usual, “Well, the program is screwed up now, so obviously we can’t leave it the way it is!” But this is, as some people like to say, just more “TBU”, or “true but useless” information. If a program is screwed up, it needs to be unscrewed up, not through the application of something that might theoretically be better, but by the application of something that actually is better. As we so often do, we are yet again proposing bold action based on a theory without research from the past or a coherent theory of action for the future. I guess I’m OK with this when it’s transportation or something like that. But when little kids are involved, I believe we must all strive for a higher standard.

And that’s the problem with standards, isn’t it? One man’s treasure is another man’s trash. Without anchoring standards to real things in the real world, we are simply running one more shell game on American education.

I’m not saying this game won’t work. Someone once said there was a sucker born every minute. I’m simply saying that we don’t know that it will work. And continuing to pretend that that’s OK is sucking the spirit out of many good people, sapping their confidence in leaders like us, killing their drive to go beyond themselves in service of the greater good, compromising their craft, and reducing their openness to possibilities in the future. In short, questionable reforms poorly administered are shutting off the flow of important information, rendering our system less not more transparent, and threatening to choke the life out of the few tribes we have that are just now beginning to grow.

It’s not just that some reforms don’t work, it’s that the people in schools that we count on to make them work find themselves further diminished each time they think their leaders have lead them astray. In truth, their leaders are good people, just like everyone else, doing the very best that they can. But I think we can do much better. Don't you?

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As Judith Browne-Dianis points out, it is important to consider the proposal to condition receipt of Title I funds on adoption of College- and Career-Ready Standards (CCRS) in light of the purpose of Title I funds. Will adopting CCRS help states to enhance the educational experience of children living in areas of concentrated poverty? It's worth pointing out that the idea does not clash with teachers' views of the potential impact of clearer, common standards. According to Primary Sources, a project of Scholastic and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 74 percent of teachers say that clearer, common standards would have a strong if not very strong impact on student achievement. The proposal certainly merits careful consideration, which sends us looking for information about how well current conditions for receipt of Title I funds work.

NCLB, of course, made implementation of systems of accountability for academic achievement gains such a condition, a fact well known to readers of this blog. Other conditions for receipt of Title I funds are at least as important, but rather poorly understood. Chief among these is the comparability requirement, one of the three fiscal requirements, the others being maintenance of effort and supplement, not supplant. The comparability requirement holds that a district's Title I schools and non-Title I schools must offer comparable services based on state and local funds. The requirement is meant to ensure that Title I dollars arriving at a school serving concentrations of low-income students actually represent additional funds, over and above those from non-federal sources. Unfortunately, the relevant statute includes a major loophole—the exclusion of teacher salaries in calculations of equity in funding, as the Center for American Progress has pointed out. And analyses conducted by The Education Trust, The Education Trust--West, and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education have documented profound inequity in actual expenditures of state and local funds between Title I and non-Title I schools. Thus, while Congress should carefully consider tying new strings to Title I funds, it should also close the loophole in the existing comparability requirement.

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I agree with President Obama that it’s a good idea to tie federal Title I aid to a requirement that states work in partnership to adopt rigorous common standards or career-ready and college-ready graduation requirements.

In Rhode Island, we have developed and adopted academic standards in partnership with three other states (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) through the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), the only regional partnership in the country.

Though we are confident that we have adopted high-quality standards, we want to be sure that our standards are rigorous enough to prepare all Rhode Island students to be internationally competitive in a global economy. That’s why we have joined with other states to align our standards with the National Common Core Standards in reading, writing, and mathematics. As the Common Core develops, we will work with our NECAP partners to conduct an alignment study. Then, we will revise our current standards to align with the Common Core.

We are also deeply engaged in working with our higher-education institutions, other state agencies, the business community, and national and regional experts to develop multiple pathways toward graduation. To meet our current graduation requirements, all of our students must demonstrate proficiency in core subjects by completing courses, succeeding on state tests, and presenting senior projects or electronic portfolios of their work. It is essential that all of our pathways – virtual learning, in-school and out-of-school opportunities to pursue industry-recognized certificates, as well as the traditional high-school experience – meet these state standards for graduation so that our graduates will be ready for success in college, careers, and life.

Adopting common standards and linking graduation requirements to college and career readiness seem to be reasonable steps that all states should be willing to take as a condition for receiving Title I funds for school improvement. I agree with the others who have pointed out that the Common Core standards should be mature and fully rolled out before state Title I allocations are tied to its implementation. Title I, however, should not necessarily be a pure entitlement, determined solely student census, poverty rates, and the cost of education. Why not encourage states to move forward with a reform agenda by building incentives or requirements into the aid formula? As educators, our work is not about maintaining the system as it is. Our work is about transforming education, advancing learning, and improving the lives of all of our students.

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Cheryl L. Sattler, Senior Partner at Ethica, LLC, submitted the following:

There's an interesting historical inaccuracy in week's National Journal education experts question, which asks in regards to the proposed college and career-ready standards , "Would it be problematic to change Title I funding in this fashion? Is the federal government reaching too far with this proposal?"

Truth is, the feds have been linking money to state standards for years, in response to low or even nonexistent standards for poor minority students. But not everyone seems to remember that, and some of the NJ experts seem to be blaming low standards on the feds rather than the states. Diane Ravitch, a Bush I education staffer (here), seems to blame the existence of the standards requirement itself for the fact that states have dumbed down their standards.

In reality, states were already dumbing down standards before the feds came along, by having separate standards for poor and minority children (and, although it got less press, for students whose first language isn't English). The whole rationale for the federal government's involvement in education is the fact that, without federal intervention, states were not doing right by these kids.

In 1994, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was known as the Improving America's Schools Act (IASA), Bill Clinton was President, and Richard Riley was the Secretary of Education. That year, the law required all states to adopt - as a condition of Title I funding - (as I recall) "high, uniform standards" for all students. The states also committed to testing students three times during their education - once per grade span. The Department of Education didn't enforce the law's timeline to adopt either standards or assessments, and by the time No Child Left Behind rolled around in late 2001, only 17 states were in full compliance (and see the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights report here).

Before 1994, states were required to have standards - but only for their Title I students. It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise - or it shouldn't - that those standards were tragically low. In some states, adequate progress for those students could be as small as one Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE). I'm not a psychometrician, but believe me when I say that's tiny.

So 1994 was a watershed year, because the focus of the IASA became not just low-income and minority students, those students who had prompted the original law back in 1964, but ALL students. Judging by the incredibly slow pace at which most states moved to adopt uniform state standards, without the feds, many states still wouldn't have them.

As NCLB has been implemented, the limitations of 50-plus sets of different state standards (and assessments) have become clear: a student's "achievement" level is defined by where that student lives.

Now that we have more data, thanks to tests and those pesky standards, it's even clearer that these kids get the short end of the stick. Hello, 7 percent passing math in 11th grade in that Rhode Island school? Guess who is educated there: poor kids and English-language learners.

Sandy Kress, who (together with Margaret Spellings, then Margaret LaMontagne) was in the Capitol so often during the debate over NCLB that he should have had an office there, is all for the new CCR standards. But it's worth remembering that the law he shepherded, NCLB, includes very little help - even less of it financial - for low-achieving schools. Enforcement, as NCLB has shown, isn't sufficient to actually fix schools (but it's pretty good at humiliating them). All in all, an interesting bunch of options.

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I wish I could count the number of times I heard Governor Roy Romer use the expression “voluntary national standards” during the Ed in ’08 campaign. The “voluntary” was a critical component, for all of the obvious political and human reasons. We excel voluntarily. We behave marginally well under coercion.

Changing the states' effort to seek a Common Core of academic standards from a voluntary initiative to a mandated adoption of those standards completely alters the focus and quite likely the quality of the effort.

Those of us who have fought the battle to clarify and raise standards at the state level understand the necessary compromise that comes with any such mandatory effort. The fact is, the best schools in America have no need for a mandated set of standards; they are already aware of what an internationally competitive standard looks like and they teach to that. Ask the best private schools in the nation if they pay attention to their state’s academic standards. They don't. They exceed them.

The ideal for us would be that every school in the country was actively and voluntarily setting their standards at an internationally competitive level, and monitoring their instruction to ensure that students were being taught effectively in order to meet them.

Since that is nothing close to our reality, we adopt the compensatory strategy of setting a statewide standard that is by necessity lower than one would hope for, simply so that we have a "floor" beneath which nobody should fall. It's never an ideal - it's an attempt to see the truth about what is happening to students.

Knowing that the states had been fairly serious about setting these standards and gauging student progress against them for a few years, this effort had felt hopeful. It would be a great benefit for state leaders to come together voluntarily to raise some admittedly low bars, and find some economies in sharing these standards and assessments in ways their state and school leaders could benefit from.

But when that voluntary effort suddenly becomes a mandatory adoption, the effort is no longer driven by desire for a higher reach. Any willingness to reach higher was predicated on states being in charge of how they would handle a transition to this higher standard. That willingness will be suddenly muted as the federal penalties for missing the mark inevitably follow.

It has already been pointed out that we don't even know what the standards look like. There has been no public comment. Fact is, the out-of-the-gate quality will have far less impact than the willingness of states and schools to actively pursue the higher standard. Where an act of the willing suddenly turns into a universal mandate, the dynamic changes immediately. And I don’t see much ultimate benefit for students once that happens.

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As Checker Finn and other experts on this blog have pointed out, the idea of ensuring that students graduate from high school prepared for college and career is way overdue. Unfortunately, there are still millions of students across the country who are not held to these high expectations. Many of them dropout before earning their diploma while others do graduate from high school, but need remedial courses in college or additional job training to be competent workers.

Thankfully, forty-eight states are already leading an effort on their own to develop new college- and career-ready standards that are being informed by the best state standards, the experience of teachers and content experts, and the general public. These standards are based on evidence from employers and universities, as well as other countries, on what is needed for colleges and careers.

As the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Commission on No Child Left Behind noted in a report released on March 1, adopting, teaching to, and measuring against well-designed high, common standards will help improve the quality and equity of education across state lines, but also economic and racial lines.

In addition to the equity issue, holding all students accountable to the same standards—versus standards that change from state to state and even community to community—is especially important in this ever more transient society in which families move across and between states. Parents need and deserve a consistent measure of their children’s progress. For states, common standards represent an economical way to measure student progress in these times of dwindling state budgets.

However, as states transition to higher standards, there needs to be a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to realign the accountability system accordingly, while simultaneously ensuring that all schools—especially low-performing schools—are accurately identified and given the resources necessary to improve.

ESEA reauthorization needs to support and encourage the state-led agenda around gearing our nation’s education system toward college and career readiness and enacting true college and career ready standards. The president’s proposal is one option to do that, but there are many others.

Unlike just about every other issue in Washington, DC, there seems to be a real commitment to reauthorizing ESEA among both Republicans and Democrats. Last month, key Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives announced plans for a bipartisan reauthorization of ESEA. Hearings on the best way to reform the law have already begun.

Rather than focusing on only one way to encourage states to adopt higher standards, we need to let this process play out and be open to all of the ideas that emerge.

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The purpose of Title I funding is to ensure that low-income students have access to a high quality education. Yet history shows us that money alone has been insufficient to meet this lofty goal. While more low-income students aspire to a college education, many fail to graduate from high school, are unable to make the transition to college, or show up on college campuses without the skills needed to succeed. Still other high school graduates arrive on the job ill equipped for the tasks at hand. We need to make high school graduation synonymous with being college and career ready.

Rigorous common standards are crucial to ensuring that all students, regardless of socioeconomic background, have access to high quality learning opportunities that will prepare them for life after high school. However, the administration should make sure that this bold vision is accompanied by a commitment to develop the capacity to make it a reality at the ground level.

In a perfect world, the federal government would let voluntary national standards emerge and be subject to more verification. Assessments would be developed and then three-year data trends could be analyzed. But waiting a few more years may unnecessarily contribute to an even less perfect world. Drafts of the proposed standards have been reviewed by states and available to the public with mostly positive reactions all around. Both NGA and CCSSO have pledged to continually improve the standards even after they are adopted. Most importantly, states have clearly shifted to the very practical consensus that they want to move now and they want to move collectively rather than separately.

A decade or two of state-by-state standards and unique state assessments have produced only moderate incremental changes and at a very high cost to individual states. These practical concerns have driven an emerging consensus among states on common standards and common assessments. One of the most interesting developments is that states are now talking seriously about working together to develop more sophisticated assessment systems that could better support local efforts in curriculum and instruction as well as assessment. These leadership efforts should be applauded and supported and the re-envisioning of Title I is just such a strong signal of support.

All that being said, it would be well for ED to proceed slowly in trying to drive better educational practice almost exclusively through compliance. The Department may believe it has little choice but to re-purpose programs such as Title I and IDEA to propel crucial improvements to student learning. But they would be well advised to adhere to Richard Elmore’s words: “For every increment of performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation.”

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I think some of the posted criticisms of the Administration's proposal are unfair and misguided.

Some say that we don't know enough now about college/ career ready standards, and, thus, we shouldn't go down this path in reauthorization.

But we do know a lot about college/career ready expectations. Achieve has done considerable work in this area. ACT and many other similar organizations have as well. Many states, including mine, have been working for several years to define such standards.

I'm well aware that there are tough, open questions and work yet to do.

Are we, for example, talking about community college readiness, or readiness to go to a research university? Are the requirements the same for a regional university as they are for earning a certificate? I have as long a list of questions as anyone.

But these are questions that smart people are addressing and beginning to answer. The President and Secretary are right to challenge us to keep working and solve them.

We don't know the Administration's timetable for the transition to the new regime. But, assuming there is an appropriate transition, states should be able to build on what is known to begin the hard, necessary task of defining the standards that mark the way to postsecondary readiness and good jobs.

I know standards aren't enough. Richard Rothstein and I agreed that so much more needs to be done to implement to high standards. I assume that the President and the Secretary understand this and that their policies will address these needs. But, because the follow-through is complex, that's no reason to stall the journey we simply must begin.

And to those who say Title I is about something else or that we have this or that to do first or that this is a new idea that's too big a stretch, I must respectfully disagree.

If we're not generally readying our young people to get a certificate, an associate's degree, or a bachelor's degree, what are we doing? According to the data I've seen, we must become far more effective than we are today at teaching our young people the knowledge and skills they'll need for the best jobs in the new economy.

The President is looking to the future, and he's seeing that we can't "do" Title I the same, old way we've done it. I may have some serious questions and issues about some of the positions that are being taken, and you can be sure I'll yelp a lot about them. But I credit the Administration for its foresight and courage in showing us where we must go.

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How many “new” ideas must we re-invent before we focus on what is really needed? To tie Title I dollars to college and career readiness is an awfully big stretch, not only of the imagination, but of the actual dollars the Administration has yet to fund. I am a huge fan of targeting dollars to where the need is and to identify those best practices which should be replicable throughout the nation so as to maximize the investment of our reform efforts. But this concept, though a noble one, is so broad that there is no target to “aim at” with the Title I funds.

Let’s commit to the targeted student population that Title I was created to serve. And while we’re at it, let’s also commit to fully funding all federal education mandates, in particular, IDEA. It just seems like another “great idea” which diverts our attention away from the real issues of fully funding past, present, and future federally mandated programs.

All this talk of standards, whether the Administration's College and Career-Ready standards, or the common standards being promoted by the governors, is a substitute for serious thought about how to evaluate schools and states. Sandy Kress is correct. Adopting "high" standards is the easy part. Translating the standards into a new curriculum; training teachers, where necessary, to implement the new curriculum; developing evaluations of whether teachers are doing it well; creating assessments to determine the extent to which students are reaching the new standards; and judging whether performance on these assessments is adequate – these five (as I count them) additional steps are all necessary, and each is more difficult than creating and adopting new high standards themselves.

If the federal government will simply require states to adopt common standards (or their own standards similar to the common standards) as a condition of funds, it will be easy for states to meet this requirement. And it will do nothing to affect how education is actually conducted in real schools and classrooms.

Partly this misunderstanding about the difference between standards and the next five steps stems from the sloppy way policymakers have talked about the failures of NCLB. It has become fashionable to say that NCLB has created incentives to adopt "low standards." What is meant by this is actually not "low standards" at all, but low cut-points on standardized tests. States can (and some now do) have high standards and low cut-points. States can (and some now do) have high standards and flawed curricula. States can (and some now do) have high standards and tests that are aligned only to the most basic of their standards.

Leaving aside whether turning Title I from an entitlement to a reward is a good idea in the first place, rewarding states simply for adopting common or high standards will accomplish nothing but a great deal of wasted effort.

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How can something that does not yet exist and has not been reviewed or tried out in practice become the "norm"? This may become a new definition of insanity. Can something be a "norm" if no one has ever done it?

For centuries, this country has operated with an educational debt, as described by Prof. Gloria Ladson-Billings, which has perpetuated and solidified inequities in our society and specifically in public education. In most states, a three-to-one ratio exists between high and low-spending schools; and significant disparities exist across states. Title I is essential to schools with high concentrations of children living in poverty. And, until there are broad sweeping changes to state school financing formulas, Title I remains the only source for an infusion of resources for our neediest children to lessen local funding shortcomings. While Title I resources still have not proven to be sufficient to pay off the debt, President Obama’s newest proposal will likely exacerbate existing inequities.

Making Title I funding reliant upon local politics around public education and accountability standards (standards that we don’t even know work yet), could be disastrous for the children Title I was intended to serve. Yes, our children need to be college ready. We also need to make sure, that we finish the business of the civil rights movement. Continuing to push standards without equalizing resources will not result in higher numbers of students going on to college. Disparities in opportunities to learn will still exist within schools and districts that will cause push-outs and drop-outs. In fact, if we continue to elevate standards without dealing with the educational debt, more children will fall through the cracks.

To put us on the road to paying off the educational debt and eradicating structural inequities, the Forum for Education and Democracy recommends:

• Linking Title I funding to state progress toward equitable school funding and allocation of resources; and
• Providing incentives for the recruitment and equal distribution of highly qualified and highly effective teachers and school leaders.

Further, ESEA reauthorization should hold schools accountable for push-outs as indicated by suspension/expulsion rates as well as drop-out rates.

We cannot continue to hold our children to standards without giving them the tools to meet the benchmarks. Reauthorization of ESEA is the Obama Administration’s chance put us on the path to getting out of the red on the educational debt--I hope they don’t blow it.

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I like the President's idea.

Having said that, I have so many questions, largely along the lines of the other responders.

Does the Title I money just depend upon the adoption of content standards, or the must the states show more about delivering to the standards, i.e., performance standards, quality of curricula, teacher readiness to teach to the standards, alignment of materials, etc.? (Standards on the page mean so little.)

What criteria will be used to determine that the standards, whether of the common set or the university-approved set, are good enough? What does college/career mean, and how does the definition affect the criteria that will be used to judge the sufficiency of the standards?

My list goes on way beyound the patience of the reader, so I'll stop here. I will just add an observation gleaned from the experience of pushing a reauthorization once upon a time myself. It's March, and the administration keeps coming forward with intriguing, but extremely complex ideas. All of that adds up, I think, to reauthorization happening next year, at the earliest.

By the way, and I'm sorry to be stereotypically Texan about this, but I do want to point out that Texas had the most check marks of all the states in the Achieve study published today on CCR. I guess that means we might be in good standing for the new Title I funding, though we weren't eligible for points for....(No, I'll stop there. I vowed to be nice in the New Year!).

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Tying Title I funding to "college- and career-ready" standards is the latest Duncan-Obama proposal that sounds good at the broad-brush level, but is fraught with devils in every detail. As with the Race to the Top, here's an offer--desperately needed federal education funding--that is nearly impossible for states and school districts to refuse, but with strings attached to unproven or proven-to-be-destructive approaches.

The examples just keep on coming. On Monday, March 1, President Obama announced $900 million in federal "turnaround" grants, which require underperforming districts to choose from four options, none of which have any record of success. The "choices" available will include replacing a principal and half the school staff or closing a school and reopening under charter management, or just closing a school and redistributing its students. Though initially hyped as successful, Secretary Duncan's use of similar methods in Chicago has now been revealed as a failure, with little to no progress in achievement and increases in dislocation and youth violence.

The fact is that too many poor children, English language learners and students with disabilities have already suffered from one-size-fits-all curriculum and instruction under No Child Left Behind. But just wait till you see what happens in classrooms when the threat of losing Title 1 funding enforces national standards, tied to national tests, tied to teacher evaluations based on test scores. It’s hard to imagine how much more narrowing of the curriculum, pressure to teach to the test and test preparation there could be, but this could be the way to find out. And, as Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn accurately note, the new "standards" don't yet exist -- talk about buying a pig in a poke!

Speaking in Raleigh, NC, Arne Duncan recently bemoaned the widespread practice of teaching to the test, which detracts from a rich and engaging curriculum. Yet he continues to put together a portfolio of initiatives that is guaranteed to ensure teachers, especially teachers in “underperforming” (read: low income) districts have no choice but to do so.

The tragedy is that there are approaches that do work to improve teaching and learning, strategies in use here and abroad that bear little resemblance to initiatives like these latest from Obama-Duncan. FairTest and the Forum on Educational Accountability recommend investing resources to build the capacity of schools and districts to improve, including quality professional development and teacher mentoring. To really move away from our national obsession with test scores and test prep, FairTest and FEA propose balanced assessment and accountability systems based on what goes on every day in the classroom. Here is more detailed information on FairTest and FEA proposals.

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College and career ready standards now seen as the norm, among states, according to a new report released by Achieve today. In “Closing the Expectations Gap,” Achieve found that 31 states have adopted high school academic standards in English and mathematics that are aligned with CCR standards.

“We applaud state leaders for spearheading what will benefit the future of our children and our nation,” said Mike Cohen, president of Achieve, in a press release. The report concludes that states, in large part, are responsible for the shift to the CCR standard.

A key part of the discussion on tying Title I to CCR is whether the ownership of the CCR movement lies, predominantly, with the states or the administration.

Does this report bolster the administration’s case for making CCR a part of Title I?

On the one hand, it's hard to be against boosting state academic standards--most of which are dismal today--to the level that attaining them (by end of high school) would represent college-and-career readiness--assuming those are the same thing, which some responsible thinkers disbelieve. Whether states would then have the gumption to "enforce" such standards is, of course, a very different question, given the likelihood that doing so would amount to denying diplomas to an enormous number of young people.

On the other hand, President Obama is making a mistake to tie Title I funding--or anything else, for that matter--to standards that haven't yet been proven, indeed in the case of the NGA-CCSSO "Common Core" initiative haven't even yet been released for public comment, much less been put into place anywhere or had assessments developed. Talking with some Common Core folks the other day, I suggested that they are akin to the Wright Brothers, trying to build a plane that they hope will fly but that hasn't yet taken to the air. What the White House and Education Department seem to be doing is placing whales on both wings of this fragile new aircraft before it even takes off. Not good for its air-worthiness and a seriously premature move for federal policy.

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I have been advocating for the creation of national academic standards for many years and even wrote a book about why we should have them and the difficulties in getting there.

But I think the President has jumped the gun. It makes no sense to tie Title I funding to standards that do not exist. I assume he is referring to the "Common Core" standards being developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They are still in the developmental stage. They have not been finalized; they have not been released for review; they have not been tried out by any school or district or state. Under the circumstances, it is far too soon to say that states must embrace these standards or risk losing the funding for their neediest students. It may be two or three or four years before we know the worth of these new standards. If they prove themselves--and they should prove themselves in a real live demonstration somewhere--then states will flock to adopt them. But as they are now an unknown quantity, words on paper and nothing more, there is no reason to compel states to adopt them. A few states--Massachusetts comes to mind--have excellent standards now. Should Massachusetts jettison its excellent standards and adopt the standards whose validity has never been proven? I understand the President's desire to see rapid improvement. But in this case, he is overreaching to push a "solution" that has not yet demonstrated its validity in the field. Without such a demonstration, coercion is misguided and might give nothing more than the illusion of progress.

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Title 1 is an effort to promote equitable educational outcomes. The most important equity goal is that every student should graduate prepared to continue his/her education--at least the ability to walk in to a community or technical college and start earning credit. The addition of the college/career ready goal to the entitlement program makes sense.

The administration has also proposed shifting more funds to competitive grants. The initial success of Race to the Top indicates that this is worth pursuing. The president's budget proposed streamlining programs. There are several billion dollars of well-intentioned programs that don't produce intended benefits or simply add more bureaucracy than needed. Links to goals, competitions, and fewer programs are all reasonable steps to incorporate into ESEA reauthorization.