It seems we discussed this issue during the week of May 10, and I can't see that anything significant has changed in the last couple of months that would change anyone's position here in a serious way. So I'll line up behind Mr. Finn and leave it at that.

The Keep Our Educators Working Act raises a couple of couples:

1. It took $69">http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/leg/recovery/index.html">$69 billion in stimulus funds to save 300,000 education jobs ($230,000 per job). Why does Senator Harkin and Secretary Duncan believe the same number of teacher jobs can now be saved for just $23 billion?
   
2. If we’re going to spend $23 billion to save teacher jobs, shouldn't we do it in a way that also drives reform? Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and I3 were part of the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the purpose of which was also “to">http://www.recovery.gov/About/Pages/The_Act.aspx">to create jobs and save existing ones.” The nation was also confronting teacher layoffs back then but Congress and the Administration used the funds to advance important reforms related to teacher effectiveness, charter schools, and turning around low performing schools. In fact, most of these stimulus programs were more focused on reform then they were on preventing layoffs. Race To the Top, for example, didn't assign more points to states who needed the funds to prevent layoffs. So it raises the question of why we wouldn't do the same now? The New Teacher Project offers some sensible ideas and Matt Miller recently raised the interesting idea of “buying out” senior teachers to refresh its workforce and begin to pay down pension obligations. The point is that if we're going to invest $23 billion, then we should do so in a way that advances some form of teacher reform.
   
3. Why does the Administration believe the Act should be exempt from the new Pay-Go rules? In February, President Obama signed into law a bill that he summed as, “…very simple. Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere.” He said such legislation was needed to rein in the deficit since, “every dollar spent would come from taxpayers today – or our children tomorrow.” This legislation and approach to budgeting was needed, according to the President, because of the disturbing trajectory of federal spending and its implications for the nation's fiscal health. This point was underscored by this week’s Treasury report that the federal deficit for April reached $82.7 billion - significantly higher than last year's deficit of $20 billion and far above the $30 billion expected by most economists. If Congress takes up this bill, the costs should be offset or funded in full.

The Harkin bill is misguided. It spends $23 billion we don’t have on something that won’t make a difference to our kids. It also fans the flames of heated rhetoric in the great civil war of teacher quality.

Here’s how I’d like to see things play out:

Senator Harkin. If you’re going to spend $23 billion, put it into teacher quality. Make a bold statement in tough times and point us in the right direction.

Teachers’ Unions. Begin your long-overdue transformation from a patchwork quilt of rapidly weakening labor groups into a powerful professional organization. Take control of your destiny on a national scale. Become leaders in the movement toward improving teacher quality. Start driving the train before it leaves the station without you.

Policymakers, elected officials, and philanthropists. Get off the “Fire bad teachers” meme and onto the “Grow good teachers” meme. Keep the nation focused on the value of developing more good teachers rather than wasting cycles getting rid of bad ones.

President Obama and Secretary Duncan. Call a meeting in the Oval with Mr. Van Roekel and Ms. Weingarten for the historic purpose of striking “the grand bargain”. Work with union leaders to create a system that gives teachers what they want—autonomy and lifetime employment—in exchange for what our children need—high degrees of competence and long years of service. This is the best path to creating the stable, high-quality educational workforce our nation requires.

All of us. Keep our eyes on the prize: a great teacher in every classroom. Most of the details we’re scrapping over wouldn’t be worth the hot air we’re wasting on them if we had enough good teachers.

Anyone who cares about education—and who isn’t a kid—is going to have to give up a little something to make this “good teacher” thing work. It may be money. It may be power. It may be tradition. It may be victimhood, martyrdom, and that unquenchable thirst for social justice. It may be a huge chunk of ideology, or a tiny slice of humble pie. Either way, it’s worth it. I’ve been in enough classrooms to know the one thing that works and the dozens of things that don’t.

During reform, we’ve constructed and popularized two powerful ideas: (1) Good teachers make the difference; and (2) The best way to improve school is to get rid of the bad ones. The Harkin bill awkwardly straddles both of these notions. Presumably, the “good” in this bill is that it would keep teachers working, that some of these teachers would be good teachers, and that good teachers make a big difference in kids’ lives. The “bad” in this bill is that firing teachers based on seniority rather than on ability will cost us many fine, mostly young, teachers while sparing some bad teachers we’d like to remove.

The Harkin bill will not help us achieve the broader goals of reform. Neither will current legislative and policy strategies like tying federal funds to our favorite reforms du jour.

Anti-tenure laws have arrived. New teacher evaluation instruments are popping up in urban districts. And we’re trying to piece the whole thing together with performance-based pay. This classic free-market carrot and stick stuff is intellectually attractive, but it’s not the most efficient way of getting the job done right.

The folks who say, “let’s just get the incentives right” are correct—but not about the incentives. Money and recognition do not incentivize teachers. The two things teachers want more than anything are autonomy and security. If we could talk honestly about this, we could start moving toward “the grand bargain”. If teachers took responsibility for cleaning house and keeping it clean, and if everyone else worked to push for what’s good instead of against what’s bad, reform wouldn’t find itself so often stalemated.

If we persist with the current two-pronged attack on the status quo—removing tenure and incentivizing performance—I believe we will struggle, and eventually come up short, for the following reasons:

1. Dismantling tenure will be time consuming, destabilizing, and demoralizing. We can probably dismantle tenure entirely over the next 20 years. But do we want to put that kind of time and effort in to get rid of something bad when we could be building something good instead? How do we know that we’ll have what we want once tenure is gone? And even if we get it, how can we be sure we won’t also get a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences? Too much time, too much effort, too many uncertainties. This is not a responsible approach to improving teacher quality.

2. Teacher performance is unlikely to improve much through performance-based incentive systems. Nobody goes into teaching for the money, and most teachers are doing the best they can. Whether that’s good enough or not, I doubt there’s much untapped capacity. Teachers are not an economically-sensitive population. They are autonomy- and security-sensitive. If we want to solve the teacher quality problem in an adversarial way over a long and bitter stretch of time, then stay the course: threaten teachers’ job security by dismantling tenure and take away their autonomy through standards, testing, and programmed instruction. If we want to solve the teacher quality problem quickly and cooperatively, give teachers autonomy and security in exchange for competence and service.

3. Focusing on bad teachers isn’t as valuable as focusing on good teachers. As baby boomers age out of the classroom, record numbers of bad teachers will leave of their own accord. If we concentrate on pre-service training, residency-based programs, and early career mentoring, with a high bar for quality set by a national teacher-run professional organization (similar to the AMA or The Bar Association), we could increase the percentage of good teachers while many poor teachers exited voluntarily.

Recent reports by Mr. Van Roekel and Ms. Weingarten highlighting successful cooperation between labor and management in certain schools and districts are encouraging, but these are the exception, not the rule. No such cooperation exists on the national level or in the public consciousness. Unions have dug in deep against a powerful confederacy of opponents. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war….”

Will fighting Antietam (Florida) and Gettysburg (Colorado) give us the true victory we seek? Will we then send Sherman to burn down Atlanta? After surrender at Appomatox, what next? A long and bitter term of Reconstruction? How much of our children’s lives will we waste, fighting and cleaning up the mess, until we finally agree to move forward together, each with our forty acres and a school?

Yesterday, AFT honcho Randi Weingarten blasted those who would use Harkin's unfunded $23 billion bailout as an opportunity to overhaul problematic industrial-era labor practices that inflate costs and consume scarce dollars. She termed the Education Trust's proposal that federal bailout aid be made contingent on states striking down strict "last hired, first fired" policies a harmful and "academic" example of "Washingtonitis." Now, there are reasonable questions to ask about the proposal (does it just apply to state statutes? would it impact contracts?), but it's a smart idea that would lend hard-pressed districts essential flexiblity as they scramble to close yawning shortfalls. And, for the record, I'm not at all sold on Weingarten's assertion that thinning the teacher ranks-- if done sensibly (which is what the proposal helps make possible)-- would hurt students.

Now, it's one thing for Weingarten to argue that proposal is a bad idea. Notice that she carefully avoids doing that, because it would be one more blow to her effort to market herself as a "reformer". Instead, she plays a too-clever-by-half lawyer's dodge, in which she claims that now is not the time to worry about anything other than pushing cash and that only those suffering from "Washingtonitis" would think otherwise. The unspoken catch, of course, as Weingarten well knows, is that it's only when the feds have the leverage offered by an imminent $23 billion bailout that they can provide state and local reformers with the muscle needed to overcome NEA and AFT resistance to altering "last hired, first fired." Quite a little irony. If it weren't such a transparent flim-flam, I think I'd admire Weingarten's chutzpah.

And just what is the batho-infused calamity that Weingarten depicts, anyway, in her litany of impending woe? That districts which didn't plan ahead, spent every nickel they could in good times, overhired and overpromised, are now struggling to adjust to reality now that the good times have come to a halt. I'll readily stipulate that It wasn't the teachers fault that management acted this way, but I also don't recall them complaining about excessive hiring or questioning whether their districts could afford the benefits and raises they've been offering. In any organization, public or private, for-profit or non-profit, we take the bad with the good. I know it stinks, but such is life.

The Great Lakes Center has reviewed the NCTQ paper on teacher layoffs, finding that while it contains some good descriptive material, its recommendations are neither new nor easy to implement. Critically important is the defnition of a good or effective teacher. The review, conducted by Richard Ingersoll, discusses this question, which, he says, it not given sufficient attention in the review. http://www.greatlakescenter.org/docs/Think_Twice/TT_Ingersoll_NCTQ.pdf Absent that, we find the dangerous shortcuts such as relying to test scores that Sec Duncan himself has said are inadequate to do the job, or on the unfortunately inadequate reviews of teachers by principals, amidst the absence of decent evaluation systems. Absent a widely recognized, strong definition of teeacher quality, claims that teachers peak out at 3 years are at best highly debatable - it is certainly not the 'fact' that Kate Walsh claims it to be. [Great Lakes is a union-funded research center, but they hand out the research projects to very reputable people, such as Ingersoll.]

As several writers on this blog have commented, racing to change a system is likely to produce many unwanted side effects. Defenders of racing to do something have also completely avoided the issue of how it can even be done in many states as legislatures are ending their sessions. Or perhaps they should be barred from obtaining a reasonable share of public funds to protect their schools because they are not in a position to jam through unreasoned and unevidenced solutions in a hurry.

Links to the full review, a summary of it, NCTQ's original paper, are at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/docs/Think_Twice/TT_Ingersoll_NCTQ_index.htm

This may be an interesting academic question, or a provocative conversation starter at a Washington cocktail party. However, this false choice really doesn’t make sense in the real world, where school districts are weighing tough decisions right now about which education services for children should be cut—whether to cancel summer school, shift to a four-day week or issue layoff notices to teachers.

If this kind of gotcha question appeals to you, you’ve come down with a serious case of Washingtonitis. I suggest you take the same medicine I did recently—get outside the Beltway and visit teachers and students in their classrooms.

On a trip last month to Albuquerque, I visited Ernie Pyle Middle School, an example of how collaboration between teachers and administrators works for the benefit of students. By treating teachers as full partners, the superintendent and principal have transformed what had been a low-performing school into a school where any parent would want to send his or her child. They have worked together to create an environment that sets everyone up for success: small classes, safe schools, solid curriculum, healthy and adequate facilities, and opportunities for parental involvement. It’s an approach in which students are less likely to fall through the cracks—because they’re backed by a team of teachers.

And on a trip last week to Syracuse, N.Y., I visited two schools that have adopted the “Say Yes to Education” program, which provides social services, academic supports and even college scholarships for students. The schools have health clinics where students can get vaccinations, dental checkups and routine medical help. There is legal assistance for families threatened with eviction. The schools address everything in the child’s life that might interfere with learning—a bold, thoughtful education reform.

No wonder Syracuse has agreed to ramp up the “Say Yes” school-level program and apply it districtwide. No one could walk through these schools and fail to appreciate the shared commitment to helping every child succeed. Assuming it’s funded, it’s going to serve the city’s schools and students well for years to come.

Syracuse’s “Say Yes” is a wonderful reform that really works, and Albuquerque’s Ernie Pyle Middle School is transforming—but successes like these are endangered by budget cuts. Even a well-designed, well-executed program like “Say Yes” will struggle to improve students’ lives if teachers are laid off, class sizes increase, and summer school, art, music, PE and Advanced Placement classes are canceled.

It is simply ludicrous to label those of us who visit schools and witness the threats posed by imminent budget cuts as “opponents of reform” just because we know this bill must be passed quickly to have a real effect on children in September. There are no good ways to lay off teachers, but objective criteria, such as experience, are necessary in the absence of good, comprehensive evaluation systems. It is foolish and counterproductive to use a fiscal emergency as an excuse to allow principals’ personal whims to override state laws regarding layoffs and undo existing provisions in bilaterally and locally negotiated collective bargaining agreements.

And it is disingenuous to argue that this bill is a good vehicle for Race to the Top-style reforms. Real reform isn’t implemented in a few months—which is how soon this money needs to flow to prevent devastating consequences for students and their schools.

We have a choice: Use this bill to reopen the decades-long debate about so-called education reform, or use it to keep teachers teaching and students learning. We’re prepared to debate education reform with anyone at any time—only not on the backs of educators and students threatened with losses we can prevent.

Eight years ago a friend had a serious house fire. When the insurance adjustors arrived, they noted, “The fire department did more damage than the fire.”

Let’s not do that here.

Yes, it’s critical that we minimize the impact of the sour economy on our schools. And that means keeping as many of our best teachers working as possible. Unfortunately, the “Keep Our Educators Working Act” won’t, as currently drafted, do that.

Unfair seniority-based layoffs are job killers.

As Ari points out in her post, using strict seniority rules, school districts have to lay off more lower paid, newer teachers to achieve the same cost-savings as districts would if they used seniority-neutral layoff policies.

Seniority-only layoff policies also ignore teacher quality and effectiveness, so no matter how good a teacher is, if she hasn’t been teaching long enough she—and all her talent—are gone.

A bill that allows for more layoffs of better teachers is hardly what our nation and our students need right now.

The Education Trust along with the Children’s Defense Fund, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Equality Project, Education Reform Now, Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, the New Teacher Project, and the National Council on Teacher Quality have called on Congress to amend the bill to require that states accepting its funding end seniority only layoff policies. That doesn’t mean that seniority can’t play a role in layoff policies; it means that it shouldn’t be the only factor and should be considered along with other factors related to how well teachers do their jobs. Every district – no matter how elementary their evaluation system – can identify those teachers rated unsatisfactory on their performance evaluations. That information should help shape layoff decisions. Some districts have data on how effective teachers are. That data should help decide layoffs as well.

Some have argued that while seniority-based lay off policies are not ideal, and though quality and effectiveness should, in a perfect world, be weighed as well, “there’s “just not time to address that issue in this legislation. There’s an impending crisis. We have to act now!”

I would refer them to the words of my mother and thousands of other mothers for generations, “Haste makes waste”. And talented teachers—regardless of how long they have been in the classroom—are a resource our nation cannot afford to waste through mindless, mechanistic layoff policies.

What’s more, it’s a false choice.

We can move both quickly and wisely.

Congress could provide the funding in two parts. Say, one-third immediately and two-thirds once the state has put into place a quality-sensitive layoff policy. That would combine speed and smarts.

It would also send a clear signal about what we value in teachers. Not just how long they’ve been teaching our kids—but how well.

Kate Walsh, president, National Council on Teacher Quality, submitted the following in response to this week's question:

If a house is on fire, as mentioned earlier in this discussion, who do you get out first? The kids, of course. Which, in this case, means students—the true beneficiaries of effective public education.

Now, if we're considering students first, massive layoffs are not preferable because good, not just mediocre and poor, teachers will be removed from schools. But, as has already been pointed out, the federal government can't simply throw money at districts, without a guarantee as to how it will be used or whether it will be used for education at all. The latter's a given: Of course it should. The former is where NCTQ comes in, having recently released a much quoted and written about paper on the "last-hired, first-fired" phenomenon and why it should stop.

First, a conclusive body of research finds that teachers in their third year are generally about as effective as longtime veterans. Second, seniority-based layoffs—in which the highest paid teachers, no matter how effective or ineffective, keep their jobs while the newer, lower paid ones get pink slips—lead to more jobs lost, which leads to larger classrooms.

These are givens, not subjects of debate. What is debated is how, exactly, to determine who the most effective teachers—the ones who should be most immune from layoffs—are. This is a tough one because, as we all know, most schools and districts aren't really good yet at evaluating teachers, and, because of tenure laws, even those identified as poor aren't easy to shoo out the door. So we can't wait for better systems to be put in place.

In the meantime, schools do possess enough important information about teacher performance. Even lax evaluations help determine who's up to par and who isn't, with the majority of principals able to ID the very best and worst in their buildings—based on a combination of student test scores and what they observe in classrooms. And in some places, there are promising trends. Twelve districts in our TR3 database (comprised of 100 districts nationwide), for example, apply performance criteria to all or almost all teachers when making layoff decisions. And we're expecting that number to increase within the next year.

So it's already happening. When fires erupt, many schools already know how to put them out—by keeping one thing in mind: the students. Which is pretty easy to do if you're focused on retaining your best teachers. So, yes, let's spray another dose of money at a growing conflagration. But let's make sure it's aimed in the right direction.

This is a little off-topic but I think Sherman Dorn should consider coming up with a better message for public schools than ‘now more equitable than health care and housing.’

I guess we could debate the semantics of, “one of our least equitable” but it seems a little silly because to Ari Rozman’s fire code metaphor, public schools have a host of codified policies and practices that systemically shortchange minority kids and kids of color — and not a little but but catastrophically if you look at the outcomes. A key part of that, though hardly the only reason, is personnel policies like the one we’re debating here. What’s exasperating is that they can be fixed.

I won't get into the fiscal issues here, though I am tempted.

Why would we add to the huge and rapidly multiplying federal debt in this way? With the economy recovering, why would we spend resources in the same manner as that generally of ARRA, passed during the depths of the recession, as opposed, say, to more money for Race to the Top? How many teachers' jobs are truly in jeopardy and will be saved under the terms of the legislation? Is this the best way to stimulate the economy and create jobs at this time of the cycle?

I don't know the answers to these questions, though I have opinions I'll hold to myself.

To borrow Senator Harkin's metaphor, I would ask: what is the fire we're trying to put out here? Is it shoring up state and local governments' budgets? Or is it addressing aggressively the inadequate education funded by those budgets for too many disadvantaged students? In my judgment, we do our best to put out the true fire when the test for additional federal spending becomes whether and how much the marginal dollars will impact the achievement of disadvantaged students.

I admire Senator Harkin, but I think the Education Equality Project is absolutely right that there are far better ways to help teachers educate these students than passing this bill. Saving the most effective teachers is surely one of those ways. There are other strong uses of money, as we know from research and practice. But spraying these precious dollars around in this manner does not put the money where it can make the greatest difference FOR KIDS in these tough times and may indeed subsidize current practice that makes no, or a negative, difference.

If the house is on fire, as Senator Harkin says it is, let's act quickly indeed. But let's be sure first that the hose is aimed at the fire that truly threatens the house!

Here’s another effort to push “reforms” with no record of success as the answer to our education challenges. They just keep coming, like pushy door-to-door salesmen, but dear readers, don’t buy what they’re selling.

Deborah Meier is right to call this latest effort to incorporate neoliberal “reform” ideas into the education jobs bill as a “takeover of local decision-making” by the feds. And Diane Ravitch is right that such reforms are likely to leave the least experienced, least effective teachers in classrooms full of our most needy children.

As we’ve noted here before, a root cause of the problem with many of these “deforms“ is an overreliance on test scores to decide which schools are performing or underperforming, which teachers should stay and which should go. However, the scores, while excellent at identifying which schools serve children and communities in poverty, don’t provide anywhere near enough information on which to make these big decisions. Once you base your course of action on bad information, you can’t help but run into serious trouble.

Here’s an example of how these reforms are self-defeating and cause states and districts to use strategies that are not in the best interest of students. Like other states, Massachusetts took the Race to the Top bait and embraced the idea of turning around “underperforming” schools by forcing the teachers in those schools to reapply for their jobs. Like other states, Massachusetts has identified underperforming schools by their scores on the state MCAS tests. Boston, for example, has adopted the strategy of letting go at least half the teaching staff in the schools labeled “underperforming.”

Now a local foundation is paying for a fancy new web site to recruit new teachers to fill the empty slots. Who will rush to fill them? Mary Poppins? On today’s front page, Boston Globe reporter James Vaznis notes that “attracting top-notch candidates to the underperforming schools, where the complexity of urban education is more magnified, could prove even more difficult,” and “other issues might make underperforming schools unappealing to some teachers, from the possibility they would have to work an extended day to having fewer job protections because of recent changes to state law.” You think?

Everybody says they have the best interests of students at heart, but how will this really affect the students in these schools? At least half the staff will be new teachers totally unfamiliar with them, their families and their school culture. Even if the district succeeds in attracting “amazing” teachers, more than half the staff will need to start from scratch in learning about the school and its students and community. As we’ve noted before, the disruption and dislocation caused by such “turnaround” strategies have been disastrous in cities where they’ve been tried, like Chicago under Sec. Duncan and Austin, Texas.

In contrast, independent researchers have identified common attributes shared by many improving schools. The most promising ideas, backed by real-world experience, are very different from the Duncan Administration's flawed proposals. Anthony Bryk and his colleagues summed these up as coherent instruction and curriculum, professional capacity and learning, strong parent-community-school ties, student-centered learning climate, and leadership (Phi Delta Kappan, April 2010). Similar findings have been recently reported by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, and by Michael Fullan; these build on many years of solid research. The evidence suggests we should listen to Sen. Harkin’s call for a more "thoughtful" way to approach real school problems.

Thanks to my colleague and co-author, Monty Neill.

The first thing we need to acknowledge about the “Keep Our Educators Working Act” is that it will not keep all our educators working. With many states facing huge budget gaps for years to come, emergency federal funding amounts to a finger in the dike. Some school districts are so strapped for cash that they may be forced to lay off teachers this year with or without federal aid.

To be clear, we completely support efforts to limit the number of layoffs, and we give Senator Harkin enormous credit for recognizing the urgency of this crisis. But with the inevitability of some layoffs in mind, we recently called on Congress to modify the bill to address the real danger of teacher layoffs: outdated policies that force schools to ignore teacher quality in layoff decisions. Instead, layoffs are typically based strictly on teachers’ seniority in the school system. The newest teachers are laid off first, regardless of their talent or results. These quality-blind layoff rules are bad policy on a number of levels. First, they force schools to cut extraordinary teachers—even teacher-of-the-year award winners—and retain less effective teachers. They also maximize the number of teachers that must be cut to achieve a given budget reduction, since newer teachers earn the lowest salaries. And most tragically, they disproportionately affect the neediest students, who are more likely to have newer teachers. For example, in New York City, some schools in the South Bronx may lose nearly 1 in 5 teachers this year. Some people see the great junior teachers who lose out under these rules as acceptable collateral damage, since on average, novice teachers tend to be less effective than more experienced teachers. But this assumes we have to choose between laying off only novice teachers and laying off only veteran teachers. Why can’t we stop treating teachers like widgets and respect their individual professional accomplishments? No one is saying seniority shouldn’t be a factor in layoffs—just that it shouldn’t be the only one. Even teachers themselves agree; when we recently asked 9,000 teachers their opinion, nearly 3 in 4 said that factors other than seniority should be considered in layoff decisions. Cities like Indianapolis have proven that districts and unions can come together to create transparent, fair layoff policies based on performance—it is only a matter of taking action. Congress could spur this action across the country by amending the “Keep Our Educators Working Act” to require states and districts to enact quality-based layoff policies by the end of next school year if they accept funding. This would allow Congress to toss out a lifeline immediately, even to states that can’t act on new policies immediately because of their legislative calendar. It may be tempting to simply “put out the fire” with this bill and table layoff reform until another day. But the truth is that we’re facing a multi-year crisis, and we don’t have the luxury of time. Every year we delay action on this issue means another year in which schools and students will lose some of their best teachers. We need to address flaws in the fire code at the same time that we tamp down the flames. Lawmakers have a decision to make: Will they leave a generation of students and talented new teachers vulnerable to outdated, unpopular layoff policies? Or will they heed the growing chorus urging them to ensure that taxpayer dollars go towards protecting great teachers of all experience levels, and that students will never again be robbed of their best teachers because of a recession?

This is a bit tangential, but Andy Rotherham repeats a common myth when he writes, “schools happen to be one of our least equitable institutions and most of the real progress we’ve made in the past half century (for minority students, poor students, special needs students, etc…) has occurred because of federal pressure.” There are substantial inequalities in both spending in states such as Illinois and in terms of educational attainment and achievement, but the first half of Andy’s statement is overblown. Compare the distribution of education with distributions in the labor market, wealth, housing, or health care access for those under 65: inequality in any of those areas swamp inequality in education, largely because we associate education with citizenship. (Ira Katznelson, Margaret Weir, Hank Levin, and Martin Carnoy made this point in the 1980s.)

That perspective does not make the existing inequalities in education just or wise. But we should understand that part of the reason why people feel education is so important is because of our history connecting it to citizenship, and the democratic state has played an important role in reducing inequalities in education.

Rick Hess evidently believes in the colonic theory of organizational reform. I suspect there is little evidence to support the contention that school administrators’ decision-making improves as pain increases, and I am persuaded by neo-Keynesians who argue that the firing of thousands of middle-class employees across the country would have a depressing effect on general demand. More to the point, it’s clear that if there is neither additional federal support for schools nor changes to layoff procedures, there will be thousands of layoffs in the next 18 months and a disproportionate number will be new teachers. If you want to guarantee that thousands of new teacher careers die in the next year, argue against the Harkin bill.

The first rule of holes is: When you're in one, top digging. Well, we're in a massive hole. And Senator Harkin's solution seems to be to call for another shovel.

Mike Antonucci does a nice job laying out the problem with Harkin's premise. In the past decade, states and districts spent the windfall that inflated property tax roles generated during the good times. Now that the bill's come due, Harkin is calling for the feds to subsidize this inflated level of spending even as the economy clanks and grinds its way out of the bubble years. Other organizations, public and private, for-profit and non-profit, are responsibly cutting staffing, salaries, and benefits in light of changed circumstances. Indeed, it's that willingness to do some overdue belt-tightening is what the economists are crediting for the eye-popping productivity gains we've seen the last few quarters.

Harkin wants to allow school systems to keep living beyond their means, relying primarily on hackneyed metaphors intended to signal urgency. Borrowing more dollars to put of the day of reckoning is a bad idea. It's a bad idea even if it purchases some modest relief from costly, anachronistic policies (though at least we'd have some fig leaf of justification to tell our kids and grandkids when asked why we kept making promises we could no longer afford).

It's a particularly egregious move on Harkin's part because it violates Congress's own recently adopted "pay-go" guidelines. And it's disheartening to hear Secretary Duncan voicing support, as the proposal violates the "domestic spending freeze" that President Obama announced with so much fanfare in the run-up to the State of the Union. We need to start getting our house in order somewhere. And Harkin's $23 billion cash drop, lacking in offsets or funding, is a terrific place to start.

Look, we're spending at least $1.3 trillion we don't have this year. No one likes to make tough choices. Those decisions only get made, in any organization, when times are so tough that it's easier for leaders to say no than to keep kicking the can down the road. Rather than give districts one more reprieve by claiming "it's for the kids," let's tell states and districts to tighten their belts; by trimming salaries, dialing back benefits, scrutizing staffing, and doing those things that responsible employers do.

Sen. Harkin says, "When a house is burning, first you put out the fire - then you talk about reforms." Groups representing education employees are blowing a lot of smoke about jobs, but there isn't much of a fire.

The Senator's estimate of 300,000 lost jobs is the high end of an estimate being floated by interest groups with a stake in the bill, but for the sake of argument, let's accept it at face value. That would be less than five percent of the current workforce, which expanded at unsustainable levels throughout the last decade.

Elementary enrollment increased by 713,000 students in the 00's, while the number of elementary school teachers increased by 186,000. That's one additional teacher for every four additional students. (Those are NEA figures.)

It's unfortunate when any American loses a job, but you can't solve a problem caused by profligate spending with more profligate spending. Sen. Harkin's $23 billion has to come from the same taxpayers whose own job losses are causing the state budget shortfalls.

Whether the money is tied to reforms is beside the point. At a minimum of $77,000 per saved job, it's too expensive. And the same alarmists will be back next year for more.

Some of the issues and questions debated here are complicated with powerful trade-offs that policymakers should consider. This week’s question, however, is not one. Ellen lays it out well.

We know that teacher effectiveness matters

We know that “last hired, first fired” policies are insensitive to effectiveness or the professional judgment of educators in schools and school districts

We know that, at best, it’s a missed opportunity when federal dollars are doled out absent some reciprocal requirements for reform and that at worst it can reinforce ineffective systems

So if we’re going to spend another $23 billion to save jobs, a worthy goal, there really isn’t a good argument against requiring states accepting that money to curb absolutely germane practices that make absolutely no sense and have only precedent to recommend them. Senator Harkin’s quite right that Congress should be cautious about addressing “tenure” overall in a hasty way. But in the context of layoffs there are sensible intermediate steps lawmakers can take with regard to this money.

And to Deb’s point it’s hard to see conditioning federal funds on abandoning strict last hired/first fired policies as an enormous federal intrusion. In fact, it empowers local officials to actually make decisions rather than having their hands tied.

That raises two larger contextual points:

First, why do so many people who otherwise favor robust federal action in the interest of equity essentially begin fetishizing states rights and localism when the issue is schools? Especially because schools happen to be one of our least equitable institutions and most of the real progress we’ve made in the past half century (for minority students, poor students, special needs students, etc…) has occurred because of federal pressure. And second, related, if Congress were considering giving any other industry $23 billion in aid we’d be asking for some accountability and reform, no? Consider for a moment if we were talking about the oil or financial industry? At approximately $650 billion annually we’d be wise to think of public schools in the same way in terms of the scope and dynamics at work.

Teacher tenure is a highly complex and contentious issue that deserves a thorough review during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This jobs bill is not the right vehicle to take that on.

If we don’t act quickly, 300,000 educators could lose their jobs. This is an emergency situation that we have to address right now. When a house is burning, first you put out the fire - then you talk about reforms. If Congress has to spend weeks debating teacher tenure, there will be no jobs bill.

Besides, many state legislatures have completed their sessions. Even if states wanted to change their teacher tenure laws, it’s not reasonable to expect they could do so before this funding would need to be awarded in time to save educators’ jobs this fall. Allowing only those states with certain laws to receive this funding wouldn’t be fair to educators in the other states. More importantly, it wouldn’t be fair to the students in the other states. All students deserve a good education – not just those who happen to live in the “right” states

So the idea here, as in Race to the Top, is to dangle desperately needed federal funds before states and districts, to persuade them to do what they don't want to do. The idea is to hand more power to the federal government to compel state and local governments to follow the currently fashionable ideas of "reform."

Leave aside the possibility that the ideas that will be embedded in the $23 billion rescue package are very bad ideas, which they are. Leave aside the fact that Congress has no idea how to evaluate teachers or how to design a model plan for compensating teachers. Who cares? If you have the power to do whatever you want, why not do it?

The reality, however, is that the billionaire foundations and the billionaire hedge fund managers and the think tanks that they fund have created a red herring. They believe that test scores are low because of "bad" teachers and that if we fire enough "bad" teachers, we will have only "good" teachers and then test scores will be higher.

They blame teachers for the achievement gap and for mediocre scores on international tests. So, teachers must pay. They must lose job protections. Their unions must be destroyed.

But what if these so-called reformers are wrong? What if the biggest determinant of test scores (as every social science survey of scores shows) is not teacher quality but socioeconomic status (especially family income)?

And do the "reformers" understand that tenure means nothing more than due process? Do they really want to see all teachers as at-will employees who may be fired on a principal's whim? Do they want to exacerbate the teacher attrition rate? Presently, half of all those who enter teaching are gone within five years. With more de-selection and no due process, we might bring that up to 60-70%. Is that a good idea?

As we crush the last remnants of teacher professionalism, as we oust more senior teachers, as we turn increasingly to new college graduates to staff our schools, we should bear in mind the one finding on which most education researchers agree: The least effective teachers are those in their first two-three years of teaching.

Boy, are we headed in the wrong direction!

Diane Ravitch

The 15,000 school boards that Deb refers to cut bad employment deals; they know it but they can't fix it--they are simply out gunned at the bargaining table. Moving toward the new performance-based employment bargain will take a countervailing force like a federal or state grant or policy to avoid the tragedy of LIFO layoffs.

We've already spent $100b of federal funds to shore up state shortfalls. No more free money without some reforms that point the way to the system our kids deserve. As Ellen pointed out, read TNTP analysis for detail.

If every school operated under a charter held by a local nonprofit, we'd have the participation that Deb calls for. The fiscal crisis is a great opportunity for districts to step out of an operating role--at least in the case of struggling schools--and turn operations over to an operator that can do it better and cheaper.

Last point: our schools need to be more productive. Every other sector has used technology to improve outcomes and reduce costs. School formats that blend online and onsite learning have the potential to improve learning and operating productivity. Another bailout just delays the inevitable shift to more learning online.

Enough! This take-over by the Federal government of local decision making has gone far enough; making the stakes higher and higher will surely tempt more states to change their ways. But is that the way democracy is supposed to work, and is that the way to insure that our schools remain part of the commons, belonging to us, not post offices but local community assets?

Sure we misuse them; but are local school boards wore than state legislatures or even Congress?? Democrcy is a mess; should we thus abandon it? Have another aternative in mind?

There was and is a good reason that when I was born--at a time of far fewer schools or citizens-- there were 200,000 school boards in America and there are less than 15,000 now--with far less power. There's a reason opponents often speak of them as "government" not public schools. The percentage of the "public" now involved in our schools has shrunk to almost zero, and the schools themselves - as they have grown larger - are more and more bureaucratically operated.

None of this is necessary or good for educating a powerful citizenry. Let's slow down before we leap into ever more distancing of democracy from ordinary participation in public life. Democrcy as we know it needs shoring up, not further shallowing out.

Deb

With state budgets still shrinking from the adverse effects of the economic downturn, the intent behind Senator Harkin’s edu-jobs bill makes sense as a way to provide states with the necessary resources to invest in teachers – who we know are the most critical element in a student’s education. What doesn't make sense is spending that ignores strategies that we know have the best chance of closing the achievement gap. As the “Keep Our Educators Working Act” is currently written, the bill misses its own mark and should not be passed without amendment. Today’s bill isn’t focused on equity, and its $23 billion dollars won’t even have to be spent on educators.

Specifically, the act has two key problems. First, a loophole in the bill would allow every state save for Vermont to use these funds to “maintain a balanced budget,” meaning the federal government would have no way of mandating that states spend this money to keep teachers in the classroom and hire new ones – the very intent of this bill. Second, the act does nothing to change one of the most pernicious policies in education today: seniority-based lay-offs. What this means is that all staff cuts will be made based upon a “last hired, first fired” approach; there will be no effort made to layoff bad teachers and keep good ones. Compounding the problem, more senior teachers make more money, so by laying off junior staff (who make less money) a significantly greater number of teachers will end up out of work. Here again, the act is simply self-defeating.

If this bill were to pass today, who would be the losers? Kids, especially poor kids and kids of color. A seniority-based lay-off system means that schools with the most new teachers would suffer the largest losses. But for a whole host of reasons, poor districts and poor schools have higher teacher turn-over rates, which means more new teachers and – next year – more lay-offs. (It is well worth reading The New Teacher Project’s excellent research on this topic and their compelling analysis of cities like Indianapolis who have replaced a seniority-based approach with one based largely on teacher effectiveness, with the support of district and union leaders as well as teachers and principals.)

A recent Wall Street Journal article and a recent op-ed by New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein consider what this act may mean for New York City. The very poor South Bronx is expected to lay-off 14% of its teachers, while the geographically close but economically distant Upper East Side will lose only 9% of its teachers. The article tells the story of P.S. 277, a historically low-performing Bronx school that has been making dramatic gains in student achievement under the leadership of a strong new principal and with the influx of many new teachers – most of whom, unless the act is amended, are about to be laid off. A 24-year-old English teacher took her class from 28% reading proficiency at the beginning of the year to 77% proficiency by March. She will be the first teacher laid off at P.S. 277. Dismissing teachers based on criteria that have nothing to do with their effectiveness is utterly irrational, but more importantly, it is terrible policy for our kids.

There are P.S. 277s in every city and every state. Instead of supporting these schools in their tremendously challenging work, this act ties their hands behind their backs. These schools need more autonomy to build the right teams to serve their kids, not less. Any bill that spends $23 billion on education represents a huge opportunity to attack the persistent and enormous gaps in educational equity in our country, but the sloppy public policy written into this bill squanders that opportunity.

That’s why the Education Equality Project joined with seven other education and civil rights groups in sending a strong letter to Congress urging it to amend the Keep Our Educators Working Act to put the needs of kids first.