Research from the last decade confirms what many of us have long known—that teachers matter a lot. It is also clear now, from both research and experience, that standards of achievement across the United States are low and uneven.

According to the National Journal survey, there is some good news: Most folks in Washington get this, and they have some ideas on how policy can help improve teacher quality and lift expectations for student outcomes.

Let’s assume they get their way. Will the combination of stronger teachers and higher standards get us to where we need to go?

Not by a long shot.

Since the onset of the standards movement, we’ve learned the hard way that standards are insufficient. At best, collections of standards clarify essentials that all children must master. But merely possessing clarity about educational outcomes will not enable teachers to help their students learn at high levels.

Let’s examine a standard from the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Specifically, let’s take a seventh-grade English Language Arts standard for reading informational text: “Trace and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient to support the claims.”

Evaluating arguments and assessing the quality of reasoning are cognitively demanding tasks, ones that many colleges and universities struggle to teach well. And mastery of this standard, along with the others in the Common Core, would seem to set a seventh-grader on a path toward college, career and perhaps life success.

But how do teachers help students master this task?

How does a seventh-grade teacher help a student critically assess reasoning? What are the antecedent skills a student must possess in order to master this rigorous standard? What does an assignment, a lesson, a unit look like that helps a seventh-grader develop and demonstrate mastery? And what does it take to help each and every student within a class of 24 when those students come to seventh grade with reading levels ranging from fourth to eleventh grade?

And we’re asking hundreds of thousands of seventh-grade English teachers to reinvent this wheel—with little or no support—and to get it right, every single time. Really?

Graduating all students college and career ready hinges entirely on these standards materializing within classrooms as effective lessons and skillful instructional practice. This is hard and complex work. And this is where it often breaks down.

Currently, in too many parts of the United States, all too many teachers—who’ve literally been on their feet all day—spend their evenings planning next day’s lessons without the guidance of a coherent curriculum. They assemble lessons (perhaps multiple lessons) out of whatever materials they can get their hands on—random teacher’s guides, hand-me-down units, Internet sites—of questionable quality. None of the countries that are beating us on international comparisons ask this of their teachers.

For those who do have a curriculum, it is often so chock full of content standards that everything is essential—thereby rendering nothing important. Even more U.S. teachers lack strong curricular supports, research-based and practice-tested lessons, units and courses that are known to help students master particular standards.

Either way, millions of teachers are left in isolation to make complex choices about instructional design and pedagogical practice. The inevitable and unacceptable result of this situation is widespread variation in instructional quality and student outcomes.

Is it any wonder why some Washington insiders—according to the National Journal survey—are worried that a byproduct of standards might be some “teaching to the test”? Absent the guidance and direction provided by high-quality instructional supports, standardized assessments have become the default curriculum guide for some teachers who’d use something better—if only that existed.

Many of the teachers we work with are hungry for a strong curriculum. They don’t see the presence of instructional supports as an invasion of their professionalism. They see these as the tools necessary to deliver on the challenge laid at their feet—getting all students ready for college and career.

As the folks in Washington begin to gear up for a push toward ESEA reauthorization, the National Journal survey suggests we share a common understanding about the central importance of effective teaching and of establishing standards to improve achievement.

And while those understandings are essential, we won’t make any progress until we provide our teachers the tools to do their job well.

Not at least since the ‘sixties, maybe not ever, have we seen as much energy around education as there’s been the past few years: No Child Left Behind, the College Affordability and Opportunity Act, Race to the Top, SAFRA, direct student lending, not to mention the president’s commitment to regain world leadership in college education. And just hours after this week’s blog went live, the President Obama kicked off his Community College summit.

It’s all good. But I wonder whether we couldn’t be moving ahead even faster if we could harness all that energy--get it pulling in the same direction—toward college completion. And maybe we could save students we now lose through the seams we’ve left in the preschool-through-college pipeline?

I think all of us, including President Obama and Secretary Duncan, agree on where we need to be headed: toward college completion--for the sake both of our economic strength and vitality and in service to our students.

But too often, we seem to be compartmentalizing and fragmenting our education policy-making and implementation processes. Race to the Top has brought the K-12 community together. SAFRA brought the four-year-college community together. The community college initiative has brought community college folks together. And yet a different set of stakeholders is coming together to talk about regulating for-profit education businesses.

What hasn’t come together is the entire to-and-through-college community—everyone who has a stake in giving our sons and daughters an education that starts in preschool and doesn’t end until college graduation—or beyond. It’s like making energy policy without connecting the companies that extract or gather energy, those who convert it into fuel, those who transport it, and those who retail it to consumers. We recognize energy as a pipeline process. Why not education?

This kind of fragmentation exists not only on the policy-making level but on the ground as well, where it exerts a significantly negative impact on students’ ability to move to and through college. Educational attrition typically occurs most at educational transition points—elementary to middle school, middle to high school, high school to college, and two-year college to four-year college—when students experience increased rigor and social and emotional stress associated with the transition. A holistic approach to educational innovation and reform can mitigate these transitional points and thus ensure that more students, particularly those most vulnerable, successfully navigate these critical choke points in the pipeline.

What we need is not an early childhood policy, a K-12 policy, a community college policy, a student loan policy and a post-secondary policy, but an education policy.

Experts are good. They have expertise, an essential resource for serious problem solving.

But expertise comes with a cost: specialization. The value of expertise in a problem-solving situation is inversely proportional to the scope of the problem to be solved. Experts are sharp, narrow, pointy, precise. Some problems aren’t.

Need to find the best move in a given chess position? A single chess expert can give you a definitive answer. Need to design the world’s greatest digital music player? Jonathan Ive can give you an iPod.

Need to pick the next college town that will spark the next revolution in popular music and identify the next Nirvana or REM? Get an army of grizzled A&R guys, the folks from Pandora, a street team in 25 likely cities that aren’t Seattle, WA, Athens, GA, or Austin, TX, and a bunch of road-weary band managers who’ve been there, done that, bought and sold the t-shirts.

Messy problems are resistant to expertise. Often their solutions are more art than science, less about individual brilliance and personal inspiration, more about collective thought and constructive collaboration.

Such is the case with education.

When the scope of a problem is broad, or when the domain of a problem is multi-disciplinary, an expert may not be what you need—and a gaggle of experts may lead to little more than a wild goose chase.

The problem of education is broad in scope; it includes more disciplines than we can count. Because of this, no single expertise can help us put the puzzle together. In fact, using a single expertise, or even trying to merge several expertises, will likely result in colossal category errors—and the wildest of wild goose chases.

Experts work in precisely defined categories of human experience. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be experts. Category errors are common in education just as they are in any field when experts with narrowly focused expertises apply their knowledge to problems that defy easy categorization.

The most common category error in education is that of using classical economic principals as models for potential solutions. Thinking of education in terms of markets, competition, rational actors, and invisible hands isn’t inherently wrong. But it isn’t inherently right either. Education is not a business. And the oft heard idea that “Education is a business” is simply a metaphor for something that doesn’t exist.

The most likely people to develop the best sustainable solutions in education are those who work in virtually all aspects of education more or less simultaneously. We need to cultivate more people who teach K one day and have a meeting on “K” street the next. We need to seek out more people who practice both the art and the science of education. We need people who know stats as well as well as they know states.

Perhaps most important of all, we need models of education that actually model education—not metaphors of education. When we model a metaphor and apply it to the real thing, we commit the error of mistaking the map for the territory. And this is just one more reason why so many our best laid plans often go awry.

In the high-stakes game of school reform, a broadly experienced jack of all trades will probably have the best ideas when it comes to crafting practical real-world solutions. This doesn’t mean experts aren’t needed. Quite the contrary, once solutions are proposed by “jacks”, they often need to be vetted, tweaked, implemented, and studied by “aces.”

Aces sometimes reject jacks because jacks haven’t earned their way into the system as recognized authorities or owners of any particular expertise. Jacks sometimes get frustrated with aces because while aces are out there being the smartest folks in a room, jacks are often working with kids in another room—and then doing the dirty work that aces often make for them but don’t know how to clean up.

We need to stop listening to everything in mono. Put in that other ear bud, folks, because when you jump on surveys and studies you’re probably only hearing part of the mix. That is, whenever an expert says anything—or any group of experts says anything—take a deep breath and a few moments to see what a similar number of jacks has to say.

When Peer Gynt went to The Hall of the Mountain King, he was told that if he plucked out his right eye, he would be given the secret of all human knowledge. So, as any mythic character would, he popped out his eyeball and said, “So, what’s the secret?” The answer? “See with both eyes.”

This was not a good day for Mr. Gynt. And yet it seems we keep reliving this tragic error every week or so here in Education Land. If we start viewing education stereoscopically, we might start seeing solutions everywhere. After all, how can we look deeply into a problem when we don’t have any depth perception?

When jacks and aces are in conflict, we should stop right there, start the machine back up, and see if we can’t get another reading with another type of question, a different kind of data, or a completely new perspective. The real solutions to our problems are likely to lay where the ideas of aces and jacks overlap, or where the ideas of jacks can be implemented in such a way that the results they create are vetted and verified by aces through rigorous study, thoughtful reflection, and consistent replication.

I like to think that nothing surprises me about colleges of education.

But I must confess to being stunned by the results of the Fordham study. Is it possible that the survey has it wrong? If not, can you imagine professors of law, medicine, or engineering being so lacking in commitment to solid research, common protocols, the basics of the enterprise, the true needs in the field of practice, etc.?

How can we expect professionalism to be pervasive in teaching when the main avenues of preparation are as unprofessional as this survey suggests?

Making policy for the other 13,924 operating school districts by Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Miami, NYC, and 15 or 20 other cities is a logical error, but the insiders don’t seem to realize that or they don’t realize the magnitude or importance of the error. The “reformers” are good, well-intentioned people with a limited understanding of the diversity of settings that public schools serve. And maybe one size doesn’t fit all. A look at the constitutions and statutes of states where communities have more power than the state would help insiders understand that top down isn’t possible everywhere.

National Journal is about inside baseball which yields sophisticated insights into the inner workings of Washington. But failing to notice the legal structure and beliefs of much of the country leads to misunderstanding and ineffective policy which frustrates everyone.

I get frustrated because the “reformers” don’t have a clue how hard it is to get young teachers to move to Shoshoni or Big Horn Wyoming. Stretching the conversation to Shoshoni and Big Horn and Belgrade Montana or Nye, Nevada where really fine people and top notch educators work with completely different resources and communities would inform policy and enrich inside baseball. If that was easy to cover the diversity of America, someone in Washington would already be doing it and they aren’t. The National Journal with great writers and researchers ought to be able to make the stretch on big issues.

In the next Congress Mike Enzi and John Kline will play a major role in education discussions and both have small town or rural roots and sensibilities that will shape the conversation some. But the reservations and the border lands in the Southwest and other unique areas have to be included too. It is easier for the insiders to talk to each other not nearly as informative as if the insiders from other places are included. Arizona State University has a wonderful group of first rate scholars working on education policy issues as does the University of Colorado those voices need to be heard.

As I peruse the National Journal poll, I find some odd results, and it is hard to tell in many cases where the ‘correct’ response on some items comes from.

For example, the graduation rate (p.11). This is qualified as the “12th grade” rate. I suspect many respondents were more familiar with the evidence regarding the overall graduation rate, which is lower because of pre-grade 12 dropouts/pushouts. How much lower remains a contested issue, so there is no definitive “correct” answer to the overall graduation rate – which is compounded further by whether or not to include GEDs. The page does not indicate the source of the evidence.

I am not surprised that people are all over the map on “college readiness” since it is not clear there is a sufficient definition. ACT claims to measure it, but from their data many students who score below their cutoff do fine, and significant numbers who score above do not. Needing to take remedial classes would seem a reasonable definition, but I suspect colleges themselves vary greatly in what they define as needing remediation: a first year student might need remediation in college A but not in college B.

On the class size question (p.25), again it is not clear the source of the evidence or what it means. Is it based on a solid survey of actual size of classes as students and teachers experience them? Is it based on number of students divided by number of teachers? It would help to know. Perhaps more significantly, the evidence I’ve seen shows greatly ranging class sizes, with mostly larger classes for the low-income kids who more need the smaller class sizes.

So, I end up with lots of questions about the survey itself.

I was pleased to see fairly strong recognition of the prevalence and danger of teaching to the test, though thus far that recognition does not seem to be showing up in policy decisions. Unfortunately, policy decisions such as evaluating teachers based in large part (e.g., 35-50%) on student test scores, in response to administration pressure, indicates the opposite.

I've received several requests for the National Journal/Gates Foundation poll results. They are now posted online here:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Pages/national-journal-education-poll-overview.aspx

Also, as Chester Finn noted, the full Fordham Institute study is posted here:

http://www.edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_cracks-in-the-ivory-tower

The blog question barely scratches the surface of each of these studies. I would be interested in our experts' reactions to some of the other findings.

This week's question is kinda vague, frankly, but allow me at least to tee off from it to point you toward the actual Fordham report issued last week, based on expert survey work by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett of The FDR Group. You can find it at http://edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_cracks-in-the-ivory-tower. Of particular interest are some of the changes in ed-school professors' views that have--and haven't--taken place since a similar Public Agenda survey (also by Farkas et al) in 1997. There's some good news here, from an ed-reform perspective, but also a lot of troubling evidence that the teachers of tomorrow's teachers remain, for the most part, out of step both with contemporary American education reality and with the actual needs of K-12 classroom practitioners.

In five years, today’s 21st-century skills – whatever that really means – will already be obsolete. Math facts won’t.

Students used to be taught part of America’s greatness was its phenomenal ability to accommodate varied approaches to such fundamental and profound questions as, for example, what children should be taught. That was back in the embryonic dark ages of public education before Washington insiders knew best how to teach young citizens.

In those days, the only laboratories of democracy were referred to as “These United States.” Today, these pesky states – conceived by the 18th-century minds of men like Jefferson, Madison and Franklin – are treated as mere impediments to the kind of advanced learning necessary to sustain a great Republic.

What would those guys know about good education anyway bereft as they were of 21st-century skills? Apparently these bumpkins were too preoccupied obtaining knowledge and teaching math facts to their own kids to be planning for the kind of sophisticated bureaucracy American schools need now.

Lucky for them, Washington insiders and education professors of the 21st Century are here to pick up where the Founding Fathers left off. Lucky for us, there are groundbreaking opinion polls applied to these same Washington insiders and education professors so we parents can better appreciate their deepest thoughts about what our kids need to know.

If 83 percent of American education professors are teaching budding education majors it is “absolutely necessary” they teach 21st-Century Skills, fine. There ought to be plenty of schools that parents who agree can choose for their own children.

For the rest of us though, who still believe schools should impart knowledge and teach for freedom, don’t trouble our kids with the trifling fads associated with all this 21st-century navel gazing. As long as there’s flexibility for states serious about education, as long as there are ample charter schools for parents serious about liberal (classical) education, as long as there are places for true academic professionals to empower their pupils for authentic liberty, that’s fine, too. Leave it to these Americans to consider the country’s future and the role our kids might play leading it.

This week’s NJ query asks whether there’s a “sweet spot of common knowledge in a field that facilitates consensus.” If it’s really true that only 36 percent of education experts can be brought to agree it’s essential for children to memorize basic math facts, why there’s your answer.

No. Not presently. Not anytime soon.

An aggressive leap toward a true academic marketplace and away from a calcified, centralized, unionized education bureaucracy is the surest way to preserve schools that give honored status to educators who can impart true knowledge instead of trendy buzzwords. In every case, these will be teachers whose students know their math facts.

I find it utterly ironic in a discussion of how we can move to a world of "respect for evidence and a shift away from facile, bumper-sticker plicymaking" that our friend from the teachers' union blames the failure to teach math facts adequately on...NCLB!

We can debate the pros and cons of NCLB, and NCLB is certainly not perfect. But this union proclivity to blame every problem in the world on NCLB is one fine illustration of the problem this week's topic identifies.

NCLB challenged the states to set high math standards. It led the way to raising those standards by requiring more frequent NAEP comparisons, which has, in turn, generated some consensus about raising standards across the nation. The President and the Congress put more resources into research that led to identifying in IES Practice Guides, for example, more effective ways of teaching math. And the National Math Panel did a splendid job of focusing the nation's attention on both math issues and solutions, including the teaching of math facts.

So, yes, let's please try to model at least this week in this discussion an avoidance of getting hung up on "politically convenient platitudes."

What the Fordham survey shows is that most consensus out there is on politically convenient platitudes – thus the Fordham finding that “83 percent saying it is ‘absolutely essential’ for public school teachers to teach 21st-century skills.”

But ask what that means and your consensus falls apart. Only 36% agree we need to teach math facts.

If, after a decade of NCLB, the jury is still out on teaching math facts, then clearly NCLB has forced all the talent in education to put their efforts into the wrong things. The question on math matters, and has been largely ignored. The consensus on 21 century skills is a distraction at best (and a threat to real, well-rounded ecuation, at worst), but has been taken up by everyone in town.

I believe – or at least hope—that eventually, we are all going to come to a greater consunsus on curriculum, and I believe – or at least hope – that we will eventually come around to realizing that to be educated in the 21st century means what it always has: to be an enthusiastic participant in the conversation across time and space that is our human heritage. In the past year, we have seen movement toward that in the the common core standards. But standards are not worth much unless they are implemented and studied. That’s how we find out if they actually work.

If that happens, it will happen in spite of the current direction of education (which is primarily about measures and punishment) not because of it. But if it does happen, perhaps we can then begin to get a genuine national consensus, of what works.

This is a great topic. The "yes/no" quality of it leads me to point out that the truth -- and the solution here -- is "and" not "either/or."

For example, kids need "21st Century skills" and "basic math facts." As for the odd disparity in public perceptions in funding and class size, there's an "and" lurking in here, too. Spending is way up, but most folk don't really know that in their bones, even when they read it in the papers. Public perception is that "schools are bad," and people have believed since Roosevelt that "money = solutions to social problems." Money does "change" the landscape of social sector challenges, sometimes in very positive ways. However, in education this has largely been untrue -- except in the case of the most egregious injustices -- because so few people actually understand what school is like and how schools work on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, people have always been confused about the class size issue. Only those who've actually taught understand the reality of various class sizes for various ages of kids. And even most of us who teach don't like to admit that, say, a 15 percent class size increase from 20 to 23 doesn't change a thing. Nor does a decrease from 20 to 17. Even swinging between 17 and 23 would only make a slight different in a primary classroom where so many kids require individual attention just to get through the day. Even huge increases like 20-30 can be easily dealt with using simple management procedures and slightly different approaches to differentiation and assessment. But "everyone" thinks that incremental class size changes do make a difference (though all the data we have contradicts this). As it turns out, the two pairs of findings you list aren't contradictory at all -- they merely indicate that:

(A) In the first example about 21st Century skills and basic math, we incorrectly view curriculum as a binary or zero-sum system, one with "philosophical" categories that render what we may think of as "common sense" approaches mutually exclusive; and

(B) The myths we hold about education point us toward funding and policy approaches that don't address the realities of education. So what you're uncovering with this question goes to the heart of why education reform doesn't work: most of our laws, policies, and programs attempt to affect things that don't exist, don't matter, are more complicated than we think they are (most issues in education are non-binary and non-zero-sum), and -- in cases like letting states fudge their test scores as part of No Child Left Behind -- actually make things worse.

The perspective of any given teacher should not be immune from criticism. As these surveys suggest, those perspectives may even be based on misinformation. But what’s striking to me over the past several years is how teachers’ professional knowledge is dismissed as selfish or parochial, while the views of mayors, superintendents, governors, and ideological advocates (and filmmakers and TV talk show hosts?) have acquired an aura of wisdom and have ascended to the fore.

If there is going to be a “sweet spot” of common knowledge in the field that facilitates consensus and allows for honest differences of opinion, it will have to be grounded in a respect for evidence and a shift away from facile, bumper-sticker policymaking.