My answer to this question draws upon my testimony to the Senate HELP Committee from April 2010 as well as a recent op-ed from New Teacher Center (NTC) policy director Liam Goldrick:

The NTC’s philosophy on teacher effectiveness rests on an understanding that great teachers are made, not born. We believe that every teacher deserves rich professional support and collaborative opportunities, including focused induction during their initial years in the profession. Efforts to improve teacher effectiveness also must address teaching and learning conditions— including the critical role of supportive school leadership, opportunities for leadership and collaboration, and individualized professional development—that greatly impact teachers’ chances of success.

Improving teacher effectiveness requires a systemic approach. Federal and state policies should aim to provide a continuum of support—from initial preparation through induction and into career-long professional development—to strengthen the skills and abilities of all teachers to impact student learning. Such a developmental focus is too often missing in current conversations about teacher effectiveness. New teacher induction and job-embedded professional development are key strategies to help transform good teachers into excellent ones and average ones into great ones, and assist those who might otherwise fail, leave, or soldier forth in isolation to strengthen their skills and abilities on behalf of their students.

Accelerating teacher effectiveness is where our greatest opportunity lies. Measuring teacher impact without providing opportunities for educators to strengthen their practice will ultimately fail. A working definition of teacher effectiveness must meet the professional needs of individual teachers. If it doesn’t reach into the classroom, it won’t matter. Such a definition narrowly aimed only at the so-called ‘best’ or ‘worst’ teachers will be a missed opportunity to strengthen teaching effectiveness in every classroom throughout our nation.

NTC Op-Ed: http://www.newteachercenter.org/pdfs/goldrick-fedpolicy_effective_teaching.pdf

U.S. Senate Testimony: http://help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Moir.pdf

We once had a party in this country called the Know Nothings and now it seems we have a new movement called the Do Nothings, ostensibly led by Diane Ravitch. She proposes in her book, in her blogs and in public statements that we do …. nothing - nothing about being last in the world in math and science education, nothing about the achievement gap between Black and Latino students and their white and Asian peers, and nothing about 80% of low income students not reading on grade level. The system, as Ravitch sees it, is working great just as it is.

Today, we have fallen behind the rest of the world. How bad is it? In California, the state spends more on its prison system than on its system of higher education. How many other states have passed this critical milestone?

You would think the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) would be clamoring for reform. "Let's reform our system until all kids are learning," you'd imagine would be the cry of leaders like Randi Weingarten. Instead, it is "leave us alone." What do the NEA and the AFT do with the nearly $300 million in membership dues they collect each year? One might guess they elect members of Congress, senators, and presidents. President Obama and Secretary Duncan are incredibly brave to stand up to the biggest contributor to Democratic Party coffers. But President Obama got elected without their money (they gave all theirs to Hillary), and he will do it again. In the meantime, we have for the first time a Democratic President that is not beholden to the teachers unions. Can you see this “Nixon went to China moment?”

What concerns me about the criticism of Ravitch, Weingarten, and others who hold these beliefs is that they are so sweeping in nature: all charters are bad, all tenure is good, all accountability is bad, the unions are the good guys, and the Democrat president and his education secretary the bad guys. Such a black and white world does not exist. The issue of the state of public education is such a complex one, it deserves nothing less than a more nuanced discussion. Why not look at all model programs that are making a difference—charter or not—and learn from organizations that have closed the achievement gap like Aspire, ICEF Public Schools, YES College Prep, and Uncommon Schools?

Eighty percent of low income children of color in this country cannot read at grade level by the 4th grade. Nearly 30 percent can’t read at all. In a just world, in a nation that claims to offer equality opportunity for all, if I am a reading teacher and every year I only teach 20 percent of my students to read well, should I expect to keep my job? Blaming it on children, on their environmental factors – poverty, single parent families, etc. – is unacceptable. I have them for seven hours a day. Every child will learn how to read in my class.

Ten years from now, we will wonder how Duncan got so many states to dramatically realign their laws to favor children over the interests of adults with just $5 billion—less than Los Angeles Unified’s annual budget. We will wonder how a mere $5 billion carrot changed the policies of a half-trillion-dollar-a-year system. We will also wonder how anyone could have opposed President Obama’s reforms aimed at making sure that all children learned how to read, while introducing accountability that would result in consequences for teachers, principals, and their school districts if they did not.

Hopefully, the Senate will take this opportunity to re-craft the legislation, restore the cuts to Race to the Top, TIF, and charters, and go one step further: tie this second bailout of school districts and teacher jobs to dramatic changes to the tenure laws for public school teachers as a condition of each state receiving the funds. I might suggest targeting the tenure changes specifically at the most important teachers in the PK-12 continuum: our kindergarten through 3rd grade teachers.

Kindergarten through third grade teachers are very critical to our society. Studies show that if children do not learn how to read by age 8, life holds a dramatically worse set of outcomes for them. In one study, it was noted that the prison industry uses third grade test scores to forecast how many more cells they will need to build in 10 years time. About the same time we were first in the world in math and science education, only 300,000 Americans were incarcerated. Today, more than 2 million Americans are incarcerated (only 5% of inmates are illegal immigrants). Another 8 million Americans have either served their time in prison or are on parole. America has less than 6% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population. Study after study shows that most prisoners are functionally illiterate and did not graduate from high school.

President Clinton said that “literacy is not a luxury, but a right and a responsibility.” Ten years later, we have another Democratic president committed to ensuring that every child learns how to read. The amazing thing is that we learned how to teach reading 3,000 years ago. Why are we now at a loss to do teach our kids how to read? If the proposition was bimolecular physics, I might say, well every child is not capable of learning bimolecular physics. But since the proposition is teaching every child in America how to read, than the NEA and AFT should step out of the dark ages and make sure they are an organization that really means “what’s best for children is what’s best for teachers.” I think knowing how to read is what’s best for kids and what’s best for America. The NEA and AFT, who spend millions each year on political advocacy, should stop treating our nation’s education systems like their personal piggy banks, and make sure that children in America learn how to read.

Over at the Center for American Progress, senior fellow Scott Lilly pens a thoughtful response to the controversy surrounding Obey's amendment to trade some education reform money for teacher layoff funds. Lilly puts the issue in context by pointing out that rescinding money from Race to the Top and other programs was not Obey's first choice and not the only program to face cuts. Reformers, Lilly argues, are unwilling to be subjected to the accountability standards they hold and advocate for educators.

See the full post here

I can’t say it any more plainly: The status quo will not suffice.

Rep. Obey’s decision to swipe money from the nation’s most innovative education programs will deliver a stunning blow to the president’s efforts to fix a system that consistently fails our nation’s low-income and minority students.

The research is clear: These children don’t get a fair shot when it comes to equity in education. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that both low-income students and students of color are consistently assigned the least experienced and least well-educated teachers. And the schools they attend don’t hold them to the same standards as their more affluent, white counterparts. The results of these inequities are catastrophic: though many of these students enter school behind other children, the gaps that separate them from other children actually widen the longer they remain in school. Nationwide, African-American and Latino 17-year-olds read at the same level as white 13-year-olds.

Yes, budgets are tight. However, creating fundamental change in our schools isn’t something we can wait to do when we are comfortable.

Instead of “saving” our failing schools by funding a broken system, we should invest in them by supporting opportunities to spur improvement. After all, education isn’t about protecting job security—it’s about making sure our nation’s children leave school with a solid foundation for college and a career. Education reform can’t wait. Delaying action will simply punish yet another generation of schoolchildren by denying them the fair chance they deserve.

Critics of the president’s agenda characterize him as a mad scientist who is using the nation’s children as test subjects. The real story, however, is that marginal tweaks to failing schools will never give us the returns we need. President Obama’s ambitious programs already have served as catalysts for sweeping policy changes in states from New York to California. If we cut the dollars that were promised to support implementation of these changes, state leaders will never have the confidence to make similar changes again.

Those worried that the changes in schooling being sought here—higher standards, improved teaching, and aggressive action to improve the lowest performers-- are too big must recognize that it’s far more dangerous to let the system continue to fail our nation’s students. We cannot sustain a broken system. We need to make the tough long-term choices to fix it

On June 30, 2010, the Education Equality Project joined with Democrats for Education Reform, the Education Trust, and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools to release the following statement on Chairman Obey’s amendment:

ED GROUPS TO CONGRESS: “DON’T DERAIL REFORM”

WASHINGTON (June 30, 2010) – Over the past year, the Obama Administration’s groundbreaking education-reform initiatives have reinvigorated and refocused school-improvement efforts across America. Long before a single dollar was awarded, state after state rose to the challenge and made critical and sometimes long-overdue policy changes just to qualify for new and substantial federal education investments.

The great promise of these competitive grants has been their ability to drive meaningful and powerful reform to improve student achievement. That promise, however, will be broken if these resources are cut.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey’s (D-WI) proposed amendment will do. In clawing back $800 million already committed to three critical Department of Education reform efforts—Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the Charter Schools Program—to help pay for Edujobs legislation, the proposal breaks long-standing promises to states, districts, schools, and students who desperately want, need, and expect real change.

By siphoning money from the grant programs, Congress would derail these bold change efforts. In such places as New York, Maryland, Louisiana, Illinois, Colorado, and California, Race to the Top gave education stakeholders the leverage they needed to upend the systems and policies of the status quo that for generations have failed too many students.

The Obey bill would quite literally swipe hundreds of millions of dollars in already-promised funding. It would quash efforts in communities around the country that are working tirelessly to improve their schools and ensure that all students—regardless of skin color or zip code—are well prepared for life after high school.

The last thing our country or our children need right now is to roll back hard-won progress in education reform.

I wanted to explore this from a different perspective. The EduJobs vs EduReform debate is taking place against a broader backdrop of concerns about a possible double dip recession, disagreement about the needed response, and how new spending should be paid for (if at all).

On one side are the Keynesians - economists like Paul Krugman and the President’s head of the Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer, who believe the economy needs an additional round of stimulus spending. They argue that an important lesson from the Great Depression is not ending emergency stimulus programs before a recovery is assured. This is the argument the President made in a letter to G20 summit participants where he said that we must “learn from the consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too quickly withdrawn and resulted in renewed economic hardships and recession.” David Leonhardt’s NYT column has a good summary of the pro-stimulus viewpoint. Former senior White House economic advisor Keith Hennesey also outlines the nuances between the various stimulus camps.

On the other side are the Austerians who argue that the country must quickly pivot to policies that reduce deficit spending. They point to last week’s CBO’s budget outlook which estimates debt rising from about 60% of GDP to 185% by 2035. Budget watchers are also spooked by Treasury’s report that the federal deficit reached $82.7 billion - far above the expected $30 billion. Greece has become the poster country for the Austerians after its debts and deficits sparked fears of a sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan went as far as to compare the U.S. debt situation to that of Greece which he said demanded “a tectonic shift in fiscal policy."

And of course there are those who fall somewhere in the middle. Top notch economists like Donald Marron over at TaxVox are concerned about our deteriorating fiscal conditions but don’t believe now is the time for sudden austerity measures. Ezra Klein likes some stimulus for states followed by long-term deficit reduction. House Majority Leader Hoyer also supports some stimulus spending but points out that a Gallup poll found the two greatest fears among Americas are terrorism and debt. Bill Gates even waded into the debate on ABC’s This Week, where he endorsed a $16 billion energy R&D as being the type of the stimulus package we need, but he didn't back the EduJobs proposal.

So far, the President hasn’t had much success at convincing Congress that additional stimulus spending is needed. Congress failed to extend various programs over the last two months, including $35.5 billion for unemployment benefits and $16 billion for Medicaid. This created immediate problems for more than 30 states who had adopted budgets based on the assumption that Congress would pass a Medicaid extension. States now start the fiscal year facing unpleasant budget cuts, including in education, in order to address the shortfall (see governor reactions here and here).

Part of the challenge is that Congress is running out of easy offsets and increasingly is resorting to more creative approaches and gimmicks. For example, to avert a 20% cut in Medicare physicians fees, Congress enacted a six month “DocFix” costing $6 billion over ten years paid for, in part, by allowing businesses to postpone contributions to their underfunded pension plans. In other words, Congress is paying for new spending by making it easier for corporations to underfund employee pensions.

Which brings us to the EduJobs bill. From day one this was framed as an economic/budget issue because the $23 billion to help save 100,000-300,000 teacher jobs was part of a $53 billion stimulus package. So it immediately raised the question of it it made sense from a budget/economic perspective in addition to the education reform merits.

It didn’t help that the Administration gave Congress mixed messages. Secretary Duncan sent a letter to Democratic leaders on May 13 endorsing the EduJobs bill but the White House failed to include it in their list of official budget priorities. The White House tried to recover by sending a letter from the President endorsing the package. However, the letter seemed only to further upset Congressional leadership who were trying to discern the Administration’s spending priorities and how they wanted to pay for them. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey quipped “The letter is nice, [but] we still don’t have an official budget request.” Representatives Obey and Hoyer then signaled that if the Administration wouldn’t offer suggested offsets, they would explore using unspent stimulus money to help pay for the costs of the stimulus measures.

And that’s exactly what Rep. Obey did. Politics K-12 has the best play-by-play of the events of the last several weeks including statements from a bunch of the main players. The White House issued a SAP that contained a senior advisors veto threat, but it is difficult to believe that the President would actually veto a bill that provides funding to troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that the budget rescissions may be mostly symbolic (it covers less than 1% of the total costs) and intended to send a message to the Administration. This has major implications for the general appropriations process where we could see another showdown between Obey and the Administration.

The irony of this whole situation is that the reason we are even debating the need for additional state stimulus dollars is because the ARRA funding wasn’t all that stimulating (in an economic sense). For example, RttT and I3 were funded out of the stimulus but didn’t award a single point to a state’s economic need or estimated jobs created/saved. Instead, the funds were used to advance the education priorities which is great for education reform, but not so great for stimulating the economy. Now we’re given an iffy-economic reform proposal to save teacher jobs that isn’t so great at stimulating education reform either.

If the stimulus camp wins and we are going to have an EduJobs package, then it absolutely should be used to advance state budget and education reforms rather than just funding the status quo. For example, Matt Miller offers an interesting idea of using the funds to “buy out” senior teachers. David Brooks makes a completely reasonable suggestion that the stimulus funds be allocated through a “Race to the Top-like” competition that provides federal money to states that pass responsible, long-term budget plans that will fix some of their structural issues by reducing spending and pension commitments. That could help win over some of the Austerians who have been concerned about structural problems with state budgets.

It might also be worth revisiting if targeting billions solely at preserving current jobs gives us the biggest bang for our federal buck. Surely there are ways of investing funds that could help spur job creation while also advancing reforms. How many jobs would be created, including teachers jobs, if the $10 billion was invested in replicating charter schools? If it takes $20 billion to provide an electronic medical record for every individual, couldn’t $10 billion provide an electronic data record for every student which could serve as a platform for new programs and services? Couldn’t $10 billion help launch a Manhattan project for online and blended learning models that build out new adaptive engines, scale successful virtual schools, and offer scholarships for students to take online AP courses? We’ve already used stimulus funds to support two rounds of Race to the Top, so couldn’t the $10 billion be used to fund additional state plans?

In many ways, the EduJobs debate is a good indication of what the education community can expect in the next several years. Increases in education funding will be more difficult as the Administration and Congress face growing pressure to adopt “austerity” measures to reduce the deficit. It won’t be enough to simply argue for why something is good education reform. Reformers will need to argue for why it makes good budget sense as well.

The Race to the Top moved more education policy reform in six months than we’ve seen in the last 20 years. While certainly no state was guaranteed to win a piece of the $4.35 billion, the fact that so many took the initiative to enact these reforms demonstrates a willingness on the part of states to admit that the status quo is not working – that too many schools are just plain failing to provide an education to students. But they did so with the expectation that they would be given the chance to implement reforms with additional federal support if their applications were deemed strong enough.

We have seen an unprecedented, remarkable response on the state level to this federal competitive grant approach. Race to the Top has been an incredibly high-leverage initiative, especially given the relatively small incentive. Pulling back from such a public campaign now, especially when states have already submitted their second-round applications, would send an extremely destructive message to state legislators that have put their budgets and reputations on the line to move policy. These states applied for the grants in good faith, and they should not be penalized now.

Backing away from a commitment to Race to the Top and other education reforms would communicate very clearly that the federal government is actually, despite all the emphasis on the competition, quite satisfied with the status quo, and that it’s not worth applying for competitive grants in the future because who knows, the pot could be slashed anytime. This has implications not only for education reform, but also for other issues that could benefit from swifter and more drastic change if incentivized by competitive grants. Destabilizing the delicate balance that has been struck at the state level between trying to enact policy that could be implemented without winning a grant but that would benefit greatly from such a grant would be extremely detrimental to this newfound leverage, and we should not throw away the possibility of using this approach in the future.

From the state perspective, especially for states like Connecticut, threats to cut Race to the Top are particularly demoralizing. It is difficult to imagine that the DOE would offer the same number of grants as it originally planned to and just scale back the amounts – these applications have been submitted with every dollar accounted for. We assume that cuts to Race to the Top would therefore really mean fewer grants – and that could absolutely make or break the chances of states on the bubble like Connecticut. I know from working on Connecticut’s Race to the Top bill that it was only the real possibility of winning that brought together players from across the spectrum, and that if the calculus had been that we didn’t even have a chance given our dismal performance in Round 1, we would not have been able to get this legislation passed.

As others have remarked, the paradigm being presented here – between education reform and teacher jobs – is a false choice. The proposed cuts to charter schools and the Teacher Incentive Fund especially are huge proportions of the total allocated to those programs, but are miniscule in the scheme of the edujobs bill. I have to believe that the only reason you would take this amount out of reform programs – amounts that are almost irrelevant to the supposed goal of plugging a $10 billion gap, but that are vitally important to those reforms – is that you hate the programs and would do almost anything, including set up a heartbreaking dichotomy between teachers and reform, to gut them. This turns out to be about antipathy toward the very approach of federal competitive grant making to incentivize education reform, not about funding teacher jobs, and it’s an attempt to put a bad taste in states’ mouths about competitive grants. This would have huge implications for future reforms in education, including the conversation about ESEA reauthorization, as well as reforms in other areas, such as the Title I School Improvement Grant program . And that’s just plain cynical.

Funding teacher jobs is very important, but this is not where the money should come from. We cannot afford to send the message now that reforms are not taken seriously at the federal level – in fact, we need to be sending the opposite message, by continuing reform-spurring projects in future years. The situation is just too dire to continue on the path of turning out millions of students every year who are completely unprepared to participate in the world they will live in. We need reform, we need it now, and we cannot flout the efforts that states have made to do something about it by yanking the rug out from under them.

There is no direct correlation between the number of teachers housed in our school systems and the successful education of our country’s children.

In fact the opposite is true. As the number of teachers in our traditional public schools has risen disproportionately to the number of students they serve, the proficiency rates of our children at state, national and international levels have become stagnant or dwindled, falling further behind those of our global competitors. Indeed, it’s more likely that those who might be bailed out by the Obey Overage are not actually classroom personnel at all, but people whose jobs were created when money and the rules that tie its usage were plentiful.

While ‘Race to the Top’ is a bit more hype than substance, if we’re going to spend federal money, it should go to states based on applications that show some level of commitment to reform and accountability – and not just in pre-90s Washington fashion when checks were written simply because someone yelled loudly enough.

This week, both the NEA and AFT are meeting for their annual summer confabs. The NEA has already considered their priorities for the next year: removing Arne Duncan, ending the war in Afghanistan and banning the many new documentaries that show parents and voters what lies at the heart of our broken public school system (and offer ways out).

If teachers couldn’t make it with more than $100 billion in bail out aid last year, not to mention high priority in the ‘Race to the Top’, what makes anyone here think that another $10 billion would lead to a different outcome?

The education profession (which extends beyond essential personnel) needs to be disrupted by reforms such as performance pay and charter schools – not infused with endless supplies of cash – in order to succeed for teachers and kids. Even more, a process to identify the right jobs to save (i.e. the successful educators, not the oldest ones) should be demanded before Capitol Hill provides any further monies to the teacher welfare system.

Stealing from what works just to keep an over abundance of adults in education working won’t change anything; in fact it only prolongs the agony (and the inevitable).

Don't Derail Reform from The Education Equality Project, Democrats for Education Reform, The National Charter School Alliance, and EdTrust sums it up--Obey's amendment is a terrible idea.

RttT has produced more policy reform in 6 months than we've seen in a decade. It would be a real loss to drop four of the bubble states (like FL, LA, NC, NY, MD, CO), they all have plans that deserve funding. We finally have a chance to get a critical mass of states with the infrastructure of reform--standards, assessment, data, accountability, choice and performance-based employment. Killing the effort before they get started would be giving up a once in a generation chance.

This was a false choice and a dumb choice by the House but not likely to be repeated by the Senate or supported by the President

We shouldn’t have to choose between saving teachers’ jobs and preserving funding for what the New York Times has called a “thriving education reform effort.” As 13 Democratic Senators pointed out last week, Congress can work with the Obama administration to find other ways to pay for the commendable effort to limit teacher layoffs. Race to the Top and the other programs the House has placed on the chopping block have inspired educators and policymakers from across the political spectrum to come together to improve our schools, and have produced more innovation in a single year than the K-12 education field has seen in all of the last decade. It makes no sense to hobble programs that are already producing such impressive results.

Diane Ravitch suggests that these programs would fund “unproven” ideas. In fact, the foundation of the administration’s reform agenda—providing all students with effective teachers—has more research to back it up than almost any other idea in education. Decades of research have proven that teachers matter more to student success than any other school factor. Of course, even the most promising idea might not pan out, but as Diane once wisely noted, “If the certainty of success were a prerequisite for innovation, we would still be waiting for the first aircraft to leave the ground.”

And suppose we applied this “proven results” standard to all federal education initiatives. How many would pass muster? Surely not top-down professional development that is wildly unpopular among teachers and has shown no impact on student achievement. Surely not class size reduction that doesn’t reduce class sizes enough to help students (since not even the entire federal education budget could do that). Yet the federal government continues to fund these and other disproven ideas to the tune of billions of dollars every year. Not surprisingly, doing the same thing over and over keeps producing the same unacceptable results for students.

The lesson is that our educational system needs to respond more quickly to what works and what doesn’t. The innovation funding the House wants to cut would do just that by encouraging states to act on research about the importance of effective teaching. We need more of these kinds of programs, not less; innovation funding is equivalent to just 10 percent of annual federal K-12 spending and just 5 percent of the money that's already been spent to avert teacher layoffs.

Surely the burden of proof should fall on those who would continue funding failed policies while denying funding to promising alternatives.

This latest dust up over whether to allocate federal funds to competitive grants for so-called “reforms” or to help the states slog through another year of fiscal woes is like a bad case of déjà vu.

As I’ve argued previously on this blog, giving Race to the Top (RTT) grants to states that are unwilling to provide fair school funding through their finance systems – yes, most of them -- is like throwing good money after bad. Yet this is exactly what the Education Department (ED) did in RTT-Round One, and is poised to do again in Round Two. Even where the RTT reforms make some sense – such as attracting and retaining quality teachers in high need districts – the states that have or will receive these one-time grants brazenly refuse to invest their own state and local funds at levels that would allow such reforms to be implemented effectively and sustained once the RTT grants dry up.

On the other hand, we also know what happened when Congress attempted to bail out state funding formulas in FY09 and FY10 through the fiscal stabilization program in the Recovery Act. ED allowed states to use these funds to fill budget holes they created, not to support aid levels required by their formulas, despite clear language in the Recovery Act that they do so.

In this fiscal climate, and with most state finance systems in complete shambles, there is no justification for the federal government funding competitive grants for top-down reforms that the states simply can’t, and won’t, sustain over the long haul. However, if Congress wants to help states maintain essential teachers and other programs in the coming school year, it must expressly tie receipt of the funds to, at the very least, a commitment by the states to restore and maintain prior year levels of state formula aid. And if a state won’t make that basic pledge, and follow through, then it won’t get the funds. Now that’s a veto threat from the White House our nation’s public school students deserve and have been long waiting for.

I think we covered this ground pretty well in May. At that point in the drama all clues implicated Senator Harkin in the Rotunda with the $23 Billion. This time it’s Congressman Obey—or President Obama, if you prefer—in the Oval with the $800 million tucked not-so-surreptitiously into a military spending bill. As the dialog on ed reform devolves into more of a pitched battle, there is perhaps some poetic justice here. As for me, I was sure it was Colonel Mustard all the time.

How Congressman Obey thought he could dash out of D.C. with $800 million of Secretary Duncan’s money, I have no idea. Did the Congressman think someone wouldn’t notice? And why $800 million? Why not more? Why not less? If this is about saving teachers, why not save them all? If it’s about gutting ed reform, why not slay the beast and be done with it?

I haven’t changed my position from the last time we talked about this—and from what I’ve read so far, neither has anyone else. It appears someone got mad at Secretary Duncan for all the money he received and now they’re doling out an $800 million comeuppance.

Congressman Obey’s bill is not about helping children. It isn’t even about education. Losing the $800 million, if it happens, won’t put a stranglehold on ed reform, nor will safeguarding the full RTTT budget with a Presidential veto rocket us on toward Finlandic success.

Perhaps Congressman Obey is merely trying to make a point about the danger of summer learning loss.

Politics and attitude aside for a moment, let’s toss a little reality into the mix. If I’m pro-Obama/Duncan reform, I want RTTT fully funded, of course. But if I’m anti-Obama/Duncan reform, do I really want RTTT partially de-funded? That just seems to muddy the waters and give pro-RTTT folks extra wiggle room later on if this new approach to giving out money doesn’t show results.

If you were still anti-RTTT at this point, wouldn’t it be better just to watch it fall flat on its competitive grant-making face without assistance from Congress? Whether you like RTTT or not, the size and structure of the program provides all of us, regardless of our positions, an opportunity to see if this approach. As critical as I’ve been about it, it’s on, so I’ve moved on, too. I’m thinking now about kids and country, and hoping that at least a few good things emerge.

At the same time, if you’re anti-Obama/Duncan, does supporting Congressman Obey’s bill mean you’re pro-teacher? And if you are, what does being pro-teacher mean? Would you prefer to have the money spent on some other kind of reform? And if so, what reform would that be? This is where I get confused about who’s doing what to whom, which side I’m supposed to be on, and what room that crazy Colonel Mustard will wind up in next.

What I see in the postings of folks like Mr. Kress and Mr. Finn is a pretty clear line between their position on this bill and their position on education reform. What I don’t see on the other side is a similarly clear connection between saving teachers’ jobs and improving education. And I really wish I did see a clear connection, because I think this forum, and our nation, both do better when all factions have equally strong arguments.

An argument could be made, I suppose, that it’s good to save the jobs of people we care about during difficult economic times, and that teachers deserve special treatment next year. But keeping or losing $800 million worth of teachers certainly isn’t going to change the quality of education our children receive—though it may change the quality of life for perhaps a few thousand mostly young, mostly inexperienced educators, most of whom would be smart to move into other careers because we're way over-staffed these days and seriously under-funded.

What I find myself hoping more and more is that we can get past all this pro and con stuff (which really means we’re only talking about one thing) and broaden our discussion to include other possibilities. What worries me most is not the fate of RTTT or a few thousand teachers, but the fact that we have a very slim repertoire of reform strategies with which to work.

Testing, standards, charters, merit pay. That’s about it. To one side’s credit, those four things do sort of fit together. But I find myself wishing the other side had something at least as tidy to offer up in reply. Better yet, I think three or four constructive, viable packages would probably serve our nation and our children best.

We often seem to get waylaid when we focus on means—like trying to re-route someone’s $800 million—instead of ends. Maybe it’s time to rethink what we’re trying to achieve with education reform.

What do we want most for our kids? To graduate from high school or to be healthy and safe? To attend college or to be resilient and productive? To have a career or to be happy and to make good choices? To compete for individual accomplishment or to cooperate with others in support of the greater good?

We want it all, of course; we want “and” not “or”. And we think we can have it all, too, because when we’re not paying close attention, we fool ourselves into thinking that one thing comes first and leads inexorably to the other. But we can look at our own lives through the filter of own educations, and at the lives of children who have recently finished school, and see that this isn’t so.

We can see successful high school graduates who didn’t succeed in college or work. We can see college graduates who weren’t inspired by their higher educations. We can see jobs lost in industries dying out and careers that aren’t fulfilling in industries alive and well. We can see college educations that don’t make people very educated. We can see a pervasive cynicism about government and political participation of all kinds, and a general apathy in response to important issues that affect our nation’s future.

We know in theory that education is a powerful force for good in people’s lives. But we also know in practice that a good education doesn’t always correlate with a person’s ability to make good choices or to make for themselves a life that is healthy, happy, and connected to the lives of others who have been similarly successful in the pursuit of happiness.

College- and career-readiness are not ends in themselves. For many, they aren’t even means to an end. In reforming American schooling, we must create a new form of American school, a form designed specifically to produce the results we want for our kids and our country—not just a retooling of the old factory model we’ve had for a hundred years or more.

I know that $800 million worth of summer learning loss is a big deal to President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and RTTT-supporters everywhere. I also know that it’s hard to lose your job under any circumstance, and even worse when the circumstance is something you have little or no control over.

But we’re not going to get our work done by focusing on things that don’t help kids or our system of education as whole. Colonel Mustard’s in the library and I’m pretty sure he’s got the candlestick. So let’s clue in to the things that matter most and spend ourselves and our money where it has the potential to do the most good.

The choice between saving teacher jobs and education reform is a false one. States understand that no reform will matter unless there are teachers in schools executing a curriculum and inspiring and challenging students. The real choice was an “inside-the-beltway” decision. And this is why we are so disappointed in the result.

Chairman Obey has been one of the great chairmen of the appropriations committee and he knows where to find the money to fund important projects, such as the teacher jobs measure. The goal of saving teacher jobs is an admirable one and it must be achieved, but we are disappointed that Chairman Obey chose not to do so in tandem with reform. We get that thoughtful people will sometimes differ. What we don’t get is how cutting Race to the Top, the Charter Schools Program, and the Teacher Incentive Fund helps kids.

The three programs proposed to be cut and the reforms they support, represent a real opportunity to address some of the toughest educational challenges for the Latino community, whose students have a dismal 55 percent chance of graduating from high school on time. We don’t have to pull the plug on these programs to save teacher jobs. Latinos support their children’s teachers, but they also want political leaders and policy-makers to focus on kids.

America’s students deserve good teachers and a better educational system, not one or the other. To that end, the states have been engaged in a faithful effort to do their part to reform our schools. Congress should be doing the same.

The following is an excerpt from a letter that Julie Woestehoff of Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) sent to President Obama:

We at PURE were very sorry to hear that you have threatened to veto Congressman Obey's proposal to use funds previously committed to the
Race to the Top and other programs in order to save teacher jobs.

We know that you support funding jobs for teachers. However, we strongly disagree with your opposition to paying for this initiative with funds previously allocated for Race To the Top (RTTT) strategies, teacher pay-for-performance programs, and charter school expansion.

While you characterize these strategies as “sweeping reforms,” we believe that they are unproven, reckless, wasteful experiments which put our most vulnerable children at risk. In fact, we would like to see all the funding for these programs cut unless and until they have developed a true track record of success rather than simply a modestly effective public relations campaign.

We have seen the damage of Mr. Duncan's RTTT-style initiatives first hand here in Chicago where they
· destroyed neighborhood schools, weakening already challenged communities,
· ramped up the misuse of biased and uninformative standardized tests,
· expanded the numbers of students who are pushed out of schools,
· increased the marginalization of parents in their own children's education,
· privatized public education, a fundamental civil right which should be open, accessible, and accountable to the public, and
· ultimately wasted billions of precious education dollars that could have been spent actually improving the schools we have using proven methods such as holistic reform,
lower class sizes, teacher empowerment, and increased parent involvement.

We see the Obey amendment as a win-win situation. It will help save tens of thousands of teaching jobs at a time when the economic recovery is in serious danger of stalling. In addition, it will help slow what we feel is a reckless rush to close and privatize more schools, disempower parents and teachers, and increase, not decrease, the focus on standardized testing.

(Here is the link for the full letter)

Let's review the bidding here.

$862 billion spent to "stimulate" the economy. $100 billion of the total to "stimulate" education. 96% of the education money to support the status quo. Only 4% of the education money for reform.

Now, the economy is still in the doldrums.

There is NO proof that education has been improved by all the spending.

And, yet the forces of the status quo now want their hands on the few dollars allocated to reform, arguing that the Congressionally approved reforms are "bad" reforms and that they are "unproven." And what do they want to do with the few dollars allocated for reform? "Pray and spray" them, as the House appropriations bill would do. Any proof of the efficacy of that practice? No. None. Zero. Nada.

Bottom line: the forces of the status quo defend the status quo to the end. 'Could have predicted it.

If there were any evidence the Obama-Duncan “reform” plans would strengthen schools and improve learning outcomes (not just inflate test scores), this might be a tough call. But there isn’t any. Using test scores to hold teachers’ feet to the fire has been tried and has failed. Focusing on so-called “growth models” – gains in standardized test scores -- only increases the pressure to teach to these inadequate tests, continuing to narrow and dumb down the curriculum. The “turnaround” schemes demanded in Race to the Trough mostly lack evidence they will succeed. Charters, educational management organizations, closing schools and moving the students, firing most of the staff have been tried not only in Chicago, as Diane points out, but many places, with dismal results. In sum, Obama and Duncan want Congress to maintain funding for failed programs. Meanwhile, as Bob explains, schools across the nation are facing devastating cuts that will undermine learning as well as the daily conditions in our children’s classrooms and schools. The Senate should back Rep. Obey’s plan.

Real improvements in teacher evaluation, professional learning, assessment, accountability, school improvement and ‘turnaround effort,’ and student learning outcomes are needed, along with adequate funding for the many schools that lack necessary resources and therefore cannot provide their students a fair opportunity to learn. These could come from a real partnership with federal help, not bribes, threats and dictating. That is Congress’ job as it reauthorizes ESEA and repudiates the bankrupt ideology guiding RTTT and NCLB.

The action by the House of Representatives to pay for keeping teachers at the expense of Race to the Top competitive funding, teacher incentive grants, and charter school support is totally misguided. The White House should be commended for issuing a veto threat if these reductions are kept in the final appropriations legislation.

ARRA included almost $100 billion in education-related stimulus funding, the vast bulk of which went to supporting the status quo in K-12 education. The true education reform elements of ARRA, accounting for about five percent of the total, are the ones targeted for reduction by the House-passed legislation. It is these reform elements that have the potential to turn around K-12 education and bring new ideas and concepts into the current stagnant system. Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation and teacher incentive grants are causing states and localities to re-examine their practices and to seriously consider dramatically improved data systems and teacher pay-for performance, among other innovations. As a result of RTT, things are beginning to change on the ground for the better - this is not the time to go back. Competitive grants made sense in ARRA and they make sense in the future.

These should not be mutually exclusive choices. Hopefully the House of Rep­re­senta­tives will come to its senses and join the Senate in providing for both.

Step back for a moment and recall that the status quo in public education results in one-third of our students failing to graduate from high school and a second third graduating without the skills necessary for success in the job market, higher education or the military.

So given a choice between protecting jobs in this context or investing in reforms – varied experiments to determine what might work to promote increases in student learning – the latter is the wiser option.

Indeed, the reforms now being pursued and proposed can lead to sophisticated evaluation systems for educators. When difficult fiscal circumstances arise in the future, we can use ratings of teach­er per­form­ance rather than seniority when layoffs are required.

There's not a lot about the Obama administration that I applaud but they surely deserve praise for resisting this shakedown by the unions and their Congressional acolytes. Only a tiny number of federal education programs have ever turned out to have any real reform traction. Race to the Top and the Teacher Incentive Fund are at or near the top of that short list. (So was the late and much lamented Reading First program.) It little avails America's children to employ teachers if they aren't effective or are (witting or unwitting) participants in fundamentally flawed schools and misguided policies. Teacher layoffs per se are no crime--nor educationally harmful. (The student-teacher ratio in U.S. public schools was cut in half over the past half century with no discernible gains in academic achievement.) The crime is policies--such as those defended by the unions and on the administration's hit-list--that force districts faced with budget stringency to shed the newest rather than the worst teachers. In any case, Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg recently demonstrated that teacher layoffs can often be averted by a bit of belt-tightening at the local level rather than more deficit-promoting bailouts from Washington.

I strongly agree with Diane Ravitch's perspective on Congressman Obey's attempt to save teachers' job. As a veteran teacher I see that the ongoing budget cut backs cripple basic education services, to say nothing about "reforms." The pending cut backs -- over 1000 educators received layoff notices in Milwaukee Public Schools with no significant enrollment decline -- means that teachers will have very little time to provide basic services to our children. No more specials in elementary school, larger class sizes, less -- if any preparation time. Dr. Martin Luther King Elementary School with over 350 students in Milwaukee's inner city will have no music, phy ed, art or librarian next year.

Please support Obey's plan. Children should come first before ill-thought out reform agendas.

It's ironic, actually.

There is no question that Secretary Duncan's management of unprecedented amounts of grant money for states has had a positive effect on state education law. You can liken it to old fashion trust busting.

Without spending a single dollar of his war chest, the Secreatary saw states implement laws releasing the caps on public charter schools ,and removing restraints on the simple and obvious act of reveiwing student achievement as a part of teacher evaluations.

It should not have taken the carrot of federal bribes to get this done, but all of us who have worked in our legislatures understand what 1.5 billion dollars in annual union dues can buy in the hallowed hallways of lawmakers. The fact that refroms happened so quickly when the cash offer came only underscores the pent up demand for overthrowing a hidebound system. The policies were sitting ready, and in most cases had been offered before...and rejected.

The money does indeed serve as a kind of "trust busting"...in much the same way as No Child Left Behind had created a federal requirement for testing that released dozens of states from pending litigation brought by unions and their allies, and allowed the state testing programs to proceed.

When Mr. Obey first dangled this additional funding "for teachers" a few months back, reform organizations were enagaged to support the law, which they did by demanding that the law mirror other current efforts to assure that the teachers retained would be those who are making a difference with students.

Instead, after months of wrangling, the final bill not only ignored the effective teacher provisions, but gutted funding for expansion of public charter schools and innovative progams that are bringing desperately needed changes to classrooms. In other words,the current Obey offer is to spend much more of the public's money with zero pressure for achievement.

Now THAT is busted trust.

I applaud Congressman Obey's effort to save teachers' jobs and to protect the Pell Grant program by diverting funds from the Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the charter school funding.

It was a wise move, and I hope the Senate will see fit to support this thoughtful decision.

There are several reasons for my agreement with Mr. Obey.

First, it makes no sense to pursue a sweeping overhaul of education while tens of thousands of teachers are losing their jobs. The first priority nationally should be to make sure that federal funding goes to the districts with the greatest needs. Let us remember that the purpose of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was to level the playing field, to support the education of the most disadvantaged children. If we go back to the origins of federal aid to education, it is clear that Congress never contemplated giving the U.S. Department of Education the power to tell the nation's states and districts what to do and what constitutes "reform." The Obama administration seems to be unaware of the principle of federalism as it applies to education. The Department of Education has never been and is not now the repository of wisdom about how to reform the nation's schools.

Second, it is historically unprecedented that the U.S. Secretary of Education has been given a discretionary fund of $5 billion to do with as he pleases. This is simply mind-boggling. The stimulus package from which this money is derived was intended to "stimulate" the economy and to keep Americans working, not to give the Department of Education carte blanche to impose its favorite ideas on the states.

Third, the programs that are subject to cuts have little to no evidence for their efficacy. Secretary Duncan tried almost every one of these "reform" strategies when he was superintendent of schools in Chicago for nearly a decade, and no one today would point to Chicago as a model school district that the rest of the nation should copy. Charter schools have a spotty record, and on average have not produced better results than regular public schools. Merit pay (the incentive fund) has been tried repeatedly since the 1920s, and it too has not produced any dramatic results; its likely effect will be to increase cheating and to narrow the curriculum even more than No Child Left Behind. Shouldn't the Department insist on evidence-based programs before advancing a "reform" agenda?

There is something bizarre about the current situation, with the Department of Education dangling $5 billion before the states to persuade them to change their laws and adopt unproven, risky programs. Mr. Obey is right to be skeptical. So am I.