My friends, to say that we are in tough economic times for school funding is a grand understatement. As Rick Hess and Whitney Downs point out in a recent American Enterprise Institute study, state budget pressures (including $102 billion in shortfalls in the 2011-2012 fiscal year) will make it difficult to achieve our most-important goal: Ensuring that every child gets a high-quality education.

Let’s be clear: Our school funding problems have less to do with the lack of money than with our funding priorities. At all levels, far too many of our politicians are comfortable standing idly by, failing to meet the challenges facing our schools and our economy today and into the future. With a third of all high school freshmen dropping out of school, and given that only two states have 8th-grade math curricula that equals that of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, the top nations and territories in math. But it is also clear that we cannot spend our way out of gaping achievement gaps or out of a dropout crisis. We must use other resources in order to stretch our school dollars.

One of those resources can be found every day in our schools: Our parents. When schools engage more families in education decision-making and the school community, we can make cost-effective steps towards improving student achievement and keeping kids on the path to college and career success. University of New Hampshire researchers Andrew Houtenville and Karen Smith Conway noted in their 2009 study that schools would have to come up with $1,000 in additional per-pupil funding—that’s one and three zeros—to match the gains in student achievement that come from successful parental engagement.

The benefits of increasing family engagement can easily be seen in the successful turnaround of low-performing schools. In Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, University of Chicago researchers led by Anthony Bryk showed that parental engagement is one of five critical elements in turning around low-performing schools. Forty percent of schools that greatly improved reading scores successfully used parental engagement in their strategies.

Our five million PTA members prove the cost-effectiveness of family engagement every day in every school in which they volunteer. This past year, our five million members devoted at least $1.3 billion in new resources to improving our schools and communities. More than 500,000 students participate in PTA Reflections, providing our kids with outlets for creativity and arts education at a time when school funding for these programs are often subjected to cutbacks.

Best of all, we don’t even have to use more funding to foster greater family engagement. The current funding that is in place can be used to engage more families—especially those in our urban and rural communities—in our schools. Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed to increase the Title 1 set-aside for family engagement activities from one percent to two percent. This plan, which is mirrored in the proposed Family Engagement in Education Act currently making its way in the House, would increase federal funding without even increasing overall spending. Our National Standards for Family-School Partnerships are also helping school districts such as Boston make families an integral part of their reform in cost-effective ways.

We can’t do more with less until we make family engagement a cornerstone in school reform. In tough fiscal times, bringing more parents into school communities is one step in putting our existing resources to better use for all of our kids. We at National PTA are ready to help schools and states engage families and stretch school dollars so that every kid gets what they deserve: Futures that are brighter than our present.

Secretary Arne Duncan sounded the right note at the right time, challenging “preschool, K-12 and postsecondary educators" to embrace the need to do more with less as an opportunity to be smart and innovative in dramatically improving the productivity of our education system.

I was encouraged that the Secretary’s challenge included not only preschool and K-12 educators, but post-secondary as well. But I was disappointed to realize that while the Secretary’s remarks included a laundry list of innovative K-12 approaches, the only reference to college was to the importance of high school graduates being ready for it.

Unfortunately, the omission mirrors the administration’s neglect of innovation in the post-secondary space, especially compared to its smart and aggressive cultivation of K—12 innovation, especially through Race to the Top. The neglect may reflect a kind of complacency in regard to American college education: It is so good at the elite and highly-selective level, but its performance drops off when it comes to serving low-income, under-prepared students of color. But the truth is that while college education may not be as broken--or at least may not be perceived as being as broken--as PK-12, it is clearly not producing the results we need in terms of access or completion.

But can we afford innovation in college education at a time when we must do more with less? We might better ask whether we can afford not to invest in college-level innovation. Can we afford to continue leaking young people—our next generation of teachers, scientists, engineers and public servants—from a porous preschool-college pipeline? Can we afford to lose the jobs now being created in countries that take education more seriously than does the U.S.? Can we afford the costs of welfare, unemployment and incarceration that are the measurable outcomes of our failure to get more students to and through college?

Just as Race to the Top stimulated a freshet of innovation from creative K-12 leaders, there’s no telling what innovative approaches post-secondary’s most creative thinkers might put forward. But a profitable line of innovation might involve leveraging technology to emulate the high-touch programming necessary to get all students, and especially first generation college-bound students into and through college.

UNCF’s Gates Millennium Scholars Program, for example; has achieved average graduation rates of 80-90% by giving students not just a scholarship check but the kinds of non-financial support that can make the difference for many low-income minority students and makes extensive use of technology. By making iMentor available to the Gates Scholars, for instance, the program can involve Scholars and Alumni who might not be able to participate in a traditional, face-to-face program, because of their geographic location and work/school schedule. Peterson's ResumeEdge assists Scholars and Alumni to build a professional style resume. And Scholar Connection is a forum that allows GMS students and alumni to communicate with one another and with program staff, build networks and benefit from level specific-messaging that aids in educational pursuits.

These kinds of approaches have worked for our students. Other educators will have other approaches to contribute that have worked for them. But most of all, we need Secretary Duncan to exercise the leadership in college education that it has for K-12, and to respond to the challenge his speech poses: To be smart and innovative in dramatically improving the productivity of our education system.

The Secretary is correct: we must do more with less. But the “new normal”, as he calls it, is hardly a watershed moment in US education history. His speech is neither a brilliant analysis of the present, nor a powerful reframing of the future. It is merely an obvious description of reality.

As school kids like to say, “Reality bites.” And in this case, it bites hard. The question is, “How do we bite back?”

If the Secretary knows, he isn’t telling.

So how will we do more with less? By “leverage(ing) transformational change”, whatever that means. More than anything, the Secretary wants us to believe that forced austerity will inspire the innovation past profligacy has not.

The value in this speech would not be in the Secretary’s telling us what to do, but in his telling us how to do it, and how he and his department are going to lead the way. But he has little to offer here about this reality—and the pain can be felt more accutely the longer we read down the page.


“The Secretary”, Op. 2, in “We’re Broke” Minor

For a rallying Republican congress pushing deficit reduction and local control, Secretary Duncan’s “new normal” speech was pitch perfect. But for the millions of Americans who do the work of educating our nation’s children it was tone deaf and unlikely to inspire the kind of change he predicts.

The greatest challenge of education reform is not closing the achievement gap or raising the high school graduation rate, it’s reconciling the incongruity of high-level leadership with the humble truths of low-level educating.

Without clear and thoughtful leadership, reform becomes a game of “gotcha”, a fruitless exercise in red pen corrections, failed assignments, and endless discussions of assessment data that do more to define problems than to solve them.

For angry Americans, deficit hawks, local controllers, and "Waiting for Superman" fans, Secretary Duncan’s “do more with less” pronouncement probably seems an ideal “tough love” prescription.

But for teachers, principals, and district administrators, it’s not the way to inspire that extra effort, that 110%, that spirit of ingenuity and innovation that makes up for the less our Secretary is asking us to do more with.

For an activist Secretary of Education who started out with big victories on his mind, his stance in this speech is no longer that of the rallying coach or even the indomitable star player. In this speech, he's more of a cheerleader, and not a very cheery one at that.

For someone who has until now has been the national point guard for "bold reform", and who has used the full power of his office to push the ball up the court at a record pace, he seems to be sidelining himself in this speech, leaving the challenge of securing a come-from-behind victory to others.


New? No. Normal? Yes.

Secretary Duncan’s notion of the “new normal” isn’t new, but it certainly is normal. Educators have been doing more with less as long as I can remember. This includes my 15 years working in schools and the 25 years before that as I watched my mother and many of our family friends teach in an urban district.

True, per pupil spending has increased dramatically in recent decades, and to little apparent positive effect. But doing more with less is what most educators do most of the time.

Large increases in funding are inadequate to provide for the needs of our children and to realize the dreams we hold for them. There is always a sense among educators that more must be done, and that there is never enough to do it with.

Will increases in class size hurt student learning? The research says it won’t. However, most of us who work in schools know that what it hurts is teacher morale. Having 150 kids spread across five classes instead of 130 probably doesn’t change much of what a high school English teacher can or can't do for his students.

But in the minds of people who are under persistent national attack, who have been stripped of their agency by standards and testing, demoralized by manifesto-wielding big city superintendents, and sucker-punched by ill-informed self-righteous documentarians, even a small increase in class size fees like piling on.

Improving teacher morale is not a policy agenda, nor is morale even linked directly to student performance. In our data-driven reform culture, therefore, it has been rendered, like virtually all qualitative factors, an illegitimate topic for serious discussion.

Still, many of us who work in schools feel that teacher morale is in decline nationally, that it has been declining for some time, and that the Secretary’s persistent reform bravura simply gives educators one more reason every day to feel like doing a little less with the less with which he’d like them to get used to doing more.

Here are some telling teacher quotes from a recent EdWeek article:

“I know that all of this is causing our most experienced, most accomplished, most prepared teachers to rethink their plans for work versus retirement. I also know that absenteeism among teachers is on the rise. At my high-needs schools, most of our teachers are very young, and I am the only nationally certified teacher. We have already had seven teachers resign since school started in August.”

“I am dismayed that so many great veteran teachers are feeling the need to either retire altogether or leave the classroom. I can’t remember when teacher morale has been as low as it is now around our state. Teachers are not just November-tired; they are tired of being harassed and unsupported. They are tired of watching their students suffer and having their hands tied when it comes to teaching ethically.”

“I’d planned on teaching at least until I was 65. Now I’m wondering if I’ll make it two more years. It’s not the kids. The demographics of our neighborhood have become more challenging, but that’s okay. Kids are kids; And these kids need someone to care about them, invest in them, and challenge them. But it’s the micromanagement, the factory-laborer mindset, the constant push to do one more duty, attend one more meeting, and follow one more prescriptive plan that is weighing me down and wearing me out.”

This is certainly not scientific, but it's moving—at least to me.


Losing Our Appetite for Reform

Apparently, as the Secretary puts it, this is not an “eat-your-broccoli exercise”, it’s about “innovating and accelerating progress.” This may be true for the folks in Washington, but to most people working schools, “do more with less” is precisely what the Secretary says it is not: an unappetizing message that is unlikely to inspire the change he desires.

The Secretary had his own innovation program called i3. But he chose to spend the money, not on innovation, but on programs that seem to produce slightly better than average results. We discussed this issue thoroughly in this forum when the i3 grants were announced and the consensus was overwhelming: the innovation grant program was not very innovative.

Secretary Duncan took money for innovation and spent it on incrementalism instead. In the future, however, innovation—and we assume it's the real kind this time—will have to come from... where exactly?

The Secretary may be thinking of the old saw, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” There is some truth to this. But it’s the truth of hackneyed bromides and maudlin nostalgia, not the truth of pragmatic policy, powerful leadership, and inspiring vision.

In order for necessity to bear and nurture invention, inventors have to feel the necessity. I doubt, after reading this speech, that many of our country's educators will. What they're more likely to feel is betrayal or possibly just an incremental addition to the current classroom malaise.

However, both Mr. Hess and Mr. Vander Ark make good points: the discipline imposed by tight budgets can improve efficiency by forcing even the most reluctant among us into tougher—and hopefully smarter—choices.

But Secretary Duncan doesn’t tell us what those smarter choices are (except in the most general and generally useless ways). With decades of educational profligacy to overcome, I’m not confident that the “do more with less’ directive, on its own, will lead people toward better decision making.

All over the country, as educators have been focused by the pressure of testing, I have seen only poor decision making. Virtually none of my clients wants to fix what’s really wrong with their schools. Instead, they want a small short term bump in reading and math scores.

In many ways, this validates the central premise of NCLB. But the Secretary makes no mention of building on this or discussing how NCLB's unintended consequences can be mitigated by policy adjustments.

Meanwhile, school days given over to explicit test preparation are all the rage and instructional time for reading and math has increased beyond what is maximally useful to children in a single day—and far beyond what most teachers can do to use the time meaningfully.

The pressure of reform has led, for the most part, to a lot of bad decision making. Will the added pressure of economics improve our judgment? I doubt it, especially when our leaders and our teachers are so at odds.

In tough times, it is only through fair shared sacrifice and tightknit communities that we can flourish. The Secretary has focused more on programs than on people. As a result, even a pretense of fairness and community seems to have been abandoned.

Now it appears the Secretary is also abandoning the role he so seemed to relish: that of telling us what to do and, through Race to the Top, even coercing us into doing it. Indeed, his directness and his willingness to set out a clear direction, have always been his strengths.

Going forward, I think we will need at least a little of the old Secretary, even as he becomes the "new normal" Secretary, not just on the necessity of working harder, but on ways of working smarter.

Who is doing more with less in our nation right now, for example? Could he name a school or two? Is their work replicable? I’m not asking for a full report, just a hint that he actually knows how to lead us where he wants us to go.

Americans understand the importance of doing more with less but we depend, for at least some of our grit and ingenuity, on the inspiration of great leaders and the knowledge of great thinkers. To increase innovation and efficiency in education during tough economic times, we need actual and actionable ways of doing this.


What the Secretary Could Have Said

To inspire educators to do more with less, Secretary could have said things like:

"We’re going to work smarter not harder by focusing on things that make teaching easier for teachers and learning better for kids. Here’s a list of what those things are."

"We’re going to stop demonizing teachers and start supporting them in improving their skills. Here’s a list of things we’re going to do."

"We’re going to stop saying things like “do what works” and conduct rigorous research to figure out what works. Here’s a list of the promising projects currently in the works."

"We’re going to start matching the rhetoric of reform to the reality that teaching quality is the #1 factor in in-school success. This means that improving teaching quality will be our top priority. Here’s how we’re going to make that happen."

"Here’s a list of schools that are already doing more with less. Here’s how they’re doing it and how you can replicate their success in your school."

"We’re going to begin putting more effort into improving things rather than merely measuring things and hoping they improve as a result. Here’s how that’s going to work."

"We’re going to stop applying the tools of economics, the concepts of free markets, and the principles of capitalism to the culture of education. We know that education is not a business. We know that this is a metaphor and therefore not the truth. We are going to begin basing policy on what education is, not on what we wish it was. Here are a few new ideas we’ll be implementing over the next two years."


Tell Us Something We Don’t Already Know

Without the examples and the commitments, Secretary Duncan’s speech has little practical application. Does anyone need to know that belt-tightening is in order? Don't most of us have a little less in our bank accounts and a little more on our credit cards these days? Do we need the Secretary of Education to tell us that we’re firing teachers? Or that state educational budgets are tight and unlikely to swell any time soon?

Instead of talking about specific examples of success, or explicit methods for improvement, Secretary Duncan said things like this:

“By far, the best strategy for boosting productivity is to leverage transformational change in the educational system to improve outcomes for children.”

By far the least effective way to lead people toward change is to spout jargon. Using factory-speak like “boosting productivity” only validates the factory model of education and reinforces its permanence in the public mind.

The phrase “leverage transformational change” is meaningless leader-speak. To leverage something, it has to exist. I don’t see a lot of transformational change in education. The Secretary doesn’t refer to any either.

Furthermore, unless one defines what the transformation is and how the change will make things better, it’s not easy to know what the Secretary is talking about. Such empty language is often associated with empty leadership.

And yet the Secretary persists:

“To do so, requires a fundamental rethinking of the structure and delivery of education in the United States.”

I’m all in favor of a “a fundamental rethinking of the structure and delivery of education in the United States” but someone, and it really should be the Secretary, will have to tell me what that fundamental rethinking entails.

A “rethinking” presupposes that new thinking will be going on. Yet we have no indication in this speech of what the Secretary is thinking about beyond tired corp-speak clichés and vague concepts.

A “fundamental rethinking” would require an intimate knowledge of the fundamentals of education, something that people who don’t have the opportunity to spend much time working in schools often struggle to master.

I’m sure the Secretary is sincere and that he cares deeply about education and the well-being of children. But his language in this speech belies a mastery of his domain.


Money Doesn't Make the World Go 'Round

Money, or the lack thereof, is clearly on the Secretary’s mind when he tries to score points with ideas like the following:

“We spend several billion dollars a year on remedial education, re-teaching college students skills they should have learned in high school.”

True. But we do this only because post-secondary institutions knowingly accept students who they know will require remediation. Responsible admissions policy is a no-brainer—don’t admit kids who can’t cut it at your school.

The Secretary has nothing to say about this.

The expanding market for remediation exists only because institutions intentionally admit kids who need remediation. One would think that if students weren’t college-ready that colleges wouldn’t take them. But they do. The Secretary could easily take the lead on ending this wasteful practice with a few sharp words from the bully pulpit.

This problem pales in comparison, however, to the high school dropout situation the Secretary addresses next:

“Millions of children each year are not ready to start kindergarten, or they drop out of high school, costing untold billions of dollars in public investment.”

True again. But what is the Secretary’s suggestion for improving kindergarten-readiness, taming the dropout crisis, and saving these untold billions? If we’re supposed to do more with less, shouldn’t our leader be leading the way with a suggestion or two?

We already know about these problems. What we don’t know is what to do about them.

As an activist federal leader, the Secretary could lead a revolution if he wanted to. He is aware of the core problem—that the traditional factory of model of schooling can’t serve the needs our nation in a new century—and he seems sincere in wanting to correct it:

“Our K-12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools. But the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century.”

Here the Secretary is starting to sound like a leader. But he stops short, telling us only about the problem that we already know exists, and consciously omitting any solution. The factory model is the wrong model, but what is the right one?

Furthermore, why does Secretary Duncan support so many ideas, like standardized tests and curriculum standards, that make school more factory-like? Why does he use so much factory language in this speech like “boosting productivity” and “unit cost” to describe the essence of the change he’d like to see?


Working “What Works”

Clearly, the Secretary knows why American education doesn’t work. But what exactly does?

“Educators have to look at the evidence of what works to accelerate student learning—and stop doing what doesn’t work.”

This sounds good in theory, but in practice it is meaningless. In most cases, we don’t know what works, and where we do, we don’t know how to get people to do it.

Even a theoretical success is a practical failure if it is not widely implemented. Simply telling people to do “what works” is not an implementation strategy.

We do have some information about some things that make a difference. We know, for example, from the recent meta-study work of Diane McGuinness, that there are significantly better approaches to teaching early reading decoding skills than we tend to use.

The problem here, however, isn’t “looking at the evidence”; Dr. McGuinness already did that for us, and she wrote it down in an easy-to-read book. The problem is in implementing practices suggested by the evidence.

Implementation is a theme that dominates education on the ground but that rarely appears in the Secretary’s communication.

It isn’t hard to figure out that some teaching practices are better than others. If you can’t read a book, you can probably walk down the hallway in your school and watch a more talented teacher. Improving teaching quality is not an information problem, it’s actually (to use the popular business vernacular of reform) a supply chain problem.


A Break and a Block in the Instructional Supply Chain

We have two weaknesses in the instructional supply chain: a break in the chain where building administrators fail to ask teachers to do their jobs; and a block in the chain where the market for instructional programs has grown so dramatically in response to reform policies like testing and standards, and the ridiculous amounts of money we spend on them in an effort to control teachers we don't trust, that it is almost impossible for most educators to tell if program #37 is any better or worse than program #3700.

We have learned in the last decade that almost all educational studies are hopelessly flawed (see McGuinness again for some truly shocking information on this topic). The sheer volume of shoddy research and dubious programs makes the identification of responsible practice extremely challenging. When districts adopt bad ideas, teachers take the hit, year after year, learning, re-learning, and un-learning things that never seem to work as advertised.

Secretary Duncan could help us do more with less if he would merely point out which less does more. He could also lead us in the identification of current best practices for implementing best practices. But in this speech, he does neither of these things.

People with ideas in education are a dime a dozen; people who get ideas implemented are worth their weight in gold. Now that we’ll be spending less sliver, how will we get more gold?


Two Good Ideas That Weren’t in the Speech

Two keys to doing more with less in the era of the “new normal” will be improving the instructional supply chain and creating robust and replicable implementation models. Secretary Duncan could stake out important leadership positions on both of these issues. But in this speech, he seems not to be thinking about them at all.

Instead of addressing these two critical components of high-efficiency change, the Secretary offers merely a motley mix of glittering generalities. He wants us to do more with less but he offers only vague notions of what should be done, and nothing at all about how we should do it except to insist that whatever we do must increase student achievement while simultaneously reducing costs.

“Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.”

Yes, by all means, let’s do some rethinking. But saying it doesn't make it so. Who, more than the Secretary, would have better access to the best re-thinkers? What does he know—with some degree of certainty—about how his ideas can be played out to achieve the goals he is setting for us? Why won't he tell us?


Do We Really Know What Works, Really?

Isn’t the notion of “rethinking” simply another way of saying, “We don’t know what works right now; we need to think through things again”?

“Doing more with less” is a bitter pill to swallow but it’s an easy concept to understand. It’s just a matter of efficiency. Yet Secretary Duncan seems to have something else in mind, something that doesn’t quite add up.

“Doing more with less will likely require reshaping teacher compensation to do more to develop, support, and reward excellence and effectiveness, and less to pay people based on paper credentials.”

We may be able to do this. But we have no proof that it will make the system more efficient. We just think it ought to. Here again, however, Secretary Duncan is ignoring simple truths about education culture.

Education doesn’t operate like a standard market. It doesn’t respond to traditional economic incentives. Most of us continue to hope that it will, but as yet, our hopes have not been realized.

The teacher pay issue is the source of serious cognitive dissonance, and Secretary Duncan can’t seem to find much harmony in this speech. We all know we’re not supposed to engage in “input” approaches to improving education anymore. Yet changing teacher pay is an attempt to change inputs with the notion of changing outcomes as a result.


Why Doesn’t Performance-Based Pay Work the Way It Should?

Even more of a conundrum to folks who don’t know teachers very well is why teachers don’t seem to produce better results for better pay. This is a case of projection, I think.

Most of the people who play with new concepts in teacher pay are fairly ambitious, and are motivated, at least in part, by financial gain. It’s only natural for them to think that others feel the same way.

To these folks, performance-based-pay seems as American as apple pie. But not to teachers.

Anyone who has spent serious time working with teachers will tell you that money is low on the list of what makes them go—and that most teachers are going as fast as they can already, so paying them more won’t speed up the factory or kick out better widgets.

And how, in the era of the “new normal”, are we to pay teachers more at a time when we will be working with less?


The Things Teachers Really Need

The things that incentivize teachers, and the things Secretary Duncan fails to address in this speech, are things that make their lives easier and their students’ lives more learned.

Most teachers enter teaching not for the money but for the opportunity to help kids learn. What they discover is that their jobs are far more difficult than they imagined and that their kids learn very little.

Teachers need policies, programs, and practices that save time, effort, and energy, and that improve academic achievement as a result. Such ideas exist, and their use is perfectly consistent with the Secretary’s “do more with less” message, but he doesn’t mention them.

To the contrary, Secretary Duncan persists in asserting the unsupported idea that changing teacher compensation will somehow improve systemic efficiency.

“Districts currently pay about $8 billion each year to teachers because they have masters’ degrees, even though there is little evidence teachers with masters degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers—with the possible exception of teachers who earn masters in math and science.”

First of all, let’s look at the exception here: science and math teachers. That’s a lot of teachers. Apparently, the full $8 billion isn’t being wasted. Second, what percentage of the total spent on teachers does the less-than-$8 billion represent? Not nearly enough to move the needle. Finally, how does the Secretary propose reapportioning the non-needle-moving less-than-$8 billion in a way that improves student achievement? He doesn’t say.

It’s easy to develop a system that ranks teachers in some way. It’s also easy to give more money to high-ranking teachers. But unless we give less money to teachers in the aggregate, and somehow get more learning at the same time, we have not achieved the Secretary’s goal of doing more with less.

To keep aggregate pay at current levels, and increase pay for top performers, we would have to lower pay for less effective teachers. More often than not, these would be our newest teachers. Who could imagine lowering their salaries? How would this encourage more capable people to enter the field and to stay more than just a few years?

When the Secretary suggests that the solution to teacher quality is grounded in pay-for-play concepts, he should also explain that in the ear of the "new normal" we’ll be paying less to so that others may earn more—and that this might have negative consequences with regard to how we attract new people into education.


The Elephant in the Classroom

People who are excited about the pay-for-play approach avoid discussions of ideas like the possibility that teachers are socially motivated, not economically motivated, and that pay has historically been so low that stealing from less effective teachers to give to more effective teachers may not be an effective way to improve teacher quality in the long run across our system as a whole.

Entry-level pay for teachers is so unappealing that making it even less so, as we would have to do to increase compensation for more successful and experienced teachers without raising aggregate cost, seems foolhardy.

Let’s also keep in mind that the success of performance-based pay programs has not yet been clearly validated by our experience—but the expense has. To date, I can think of no large scale performance-based pay program in the US that hasn’t required additional funding.

Worse yet, none of these programs seem to have worked nearly as well as we might have hoped. How, then, would any such programs qualify as part of the Secretary’s “do more with less” approach?

It is possible that the only change to teacher pay that would be scaleable, permanent, and cost-effective is completely counter-intuitive and hopelessly antithetical to the Secretary’s free-market sensibilities? I would argue that such ideas are worth piloting and researching.

Rather than increasing differences in teacher pay based on evaluations and algorithms, we may do better to pursue exactly the opposite strategy by raising entry-level salaries, lowering top salaries, compressing the wage scale, guaranteeing a living wage, and focusing teachers on teamwork and the achievement of shared, as opposed to individual, goals in exchange for employment stability.

If you ask many teachers about performance and pay, this kind of system corresponds well with their values of fairness (however cockeyed this may seem to us capitalists), community (however anti-competitive this may seem to us free-marketeers), and stability (however dull this may seem to the more entrepreneurial among us.)

Listening to Secretary Duncan sell the “new normal”, it’s obvious that he understands his political customers well. But that he may not understand teachers very well.

So while his policies make sense to the educati, they don’t make sense to educators. As a result, they don’t make sense for our system as a whole. And they certainly aren’t consistent with a “do more with less” approach.


The Race We’ve Apparently Won (Though It Has Not Quite Begun)

The Secretary makes similarly illogical claims for Race to the Top.

“Race to the Top has incentivized states and districts to put in place teacher evaluation systems that will ensure human capital dollars are better spent.”

Only a fraction of any Race to the Top grant went toward improving teaching, and only a fraction of that might be used to improve teacher evaluation systems.

Let’s also not forget that only a small percentage of states won Race to the Top grants, and that in some of those states significant numbers of districts rejected the money and will not be participating.

Even if the Secretary had rock-solid scientific proof that better evaluation systems lead inexorably to better spending of human capital dollars, his program would affect but a tiny fraction human capital in our system.

But the Secretary doesn’t have rock-solid scientific proof; he actually has very little proof at all. Our nation has so little experience with such systems that we’re not sure how to do them well or even if they work when well executed.

There’s far more to better human capital spending than teacher evaluation systems—and far more to better teacher evaluation systems than what a few districts from a few states with a few dollars can accomplish through Race to the Top.

Furthermore, in the spirit of “do more with less” and the era of the “new normal”, even if some teacher evaluation programs do lead to better spending on human capital, where will the funding come from to replicate these models nationally?


Counting His Chickens

Secretary Duncan is taking credit here for something that hasn’t happened. His use of the past tense here indicates that evaluation systems are in place when they are not and that better decisions are already being made. This is not true. Some Race to the Top winners haven't even distributed their winnings yet.

The Secretary’s assertion that evaluation systems will “ensure” that money is spent more effectively on human capital is also far from a sure thing. It will likely be years before we see any changes based on Race to the Top, and perhaps years after that until we understand the effects of those changes.

But, apparently, we have been working hard on other promising ideas.

“The i3 fund ensures our federal dollars are being used to identify and scale-up innovative and effective practices that improve outcomes for students.”

Again, it’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of the competitive grant program was to reward “innovation” and that most of us who analyzed the winners saw few, if any, innovative ideas being rewarded. As Mr. Hess noted, “i3 should’ve been called ‘Nonprofit and District Stuff That Seems to Work.’”

For the most part, we saw successful programs receiving money to continue their work. A good spend? Perhaps. But Secretary Duncan asserts in this speech that it will have a much larger impact than seems reasonable.

He also invokes a new business concept—“unit cost”—to give i3 more board room bravado.

“The simple principle that drove our i3 grants of a little money for things with a little evidence, and a lot of money for things with a lot of evidence, will hopefully help reshape education spending for years to come. For the first time in a competitive grant program at the Department, unit cost was among the selection criteria in the i3 competition.”

Is it good to spend money on things with “a little evidence”? And how can things with “a lot of evidence” (especially if they have existed for many years) be considered innovative? It’s hard, at this point in time, to consider KIPP and TFA innovative. They’re great, no doubt about it. But innovative? I don’t think so.

Innovation connotes novelty, freshness, something out of the box. Secretary Duncan is taking credit here for supporting programs that already receive extraordinary government and philanthropic support. Of all the things i3 probably didn’t need to pay for it was KIPP and TFA. They’re doing just fine on their own.


Clocking in at the Factory Again

The Secretary also tosses an old factory model buzzword into the discussion: “unit cost”. As an English major, I may not fully understand the term but I always thought it referred to “cost per unit manufactured”.

In i3, however, what exactly was the unit? I saw no unit cost figures in the scoring analyses of the winning grants. Was it dollars-per-test-score-point-increased? Was it dollars-per-high-school-student-graduated?

Where and how in i3 was the unit cost principle applied? And how should this manufacturing concept be applied in other areas of our education system?

The Secretary's use of the term "unit cost" makes me think he has a manufacturing mentality about school. But obviously he feels that his efforts have brought us closer to getting out of the factory schooling business—and the high school dropout business as well.

“It’s also important to underscore that having a common and higher definition of success is essential to measuring the effectiveness of educational spending. That is why the amazing strides made in the last 18 months toward true college and career-ready standards and more accurate graduation rates are game-changers.”

The Secretary doesn’t explain how “having a common and higher definition of success is essential to measuring the effectiveness of educational spending.” A common definition would be helpful. But we don’t have one. A higher definition would be interesting, but we’re not sure we have one of those yet either.

Currently, we have 51 different definitions of success, most of them in a multi-year state of flux. In 2015, if the consortia finish their work successfully, we may have a smaller number of higher definitions in slightly less flux—across only three subjects, one of which, writing, has not been regularly tested by states in the past.

The Secretary’s claim of “amazing strides” is less than credible, as is his implication that these strides will necessarily lead to better measures of the effectiveness of educational spending. The connection between what we spend money on in education and what our kids learn is something we have yet to untangle.


Game-Changer or Scorekeeper?

With regard to high school grad rate data, most of we’ve achieved so far with more accurate record-keeping is confirmation that we are not changing the game at all—something those of us who work in schools could have reported without standards, tests, or new ways of defining high school graduation metrics.

The notion that measuring something changes it comes from quantum physics—and wishful technocratic thinking. What the Secretary refers to as “game-changing” is really just scorekeeping.

A new report released this week, suggests that high school graduation rates have improved in the post-NCLB era. But also that they may not be improving very quickly:

“The rate of progress over the last decade—3 percentage-points— is too slow to reach the national goal of having 90 percent of students graduate from high school and obtain at least one year of postsecondary schooling or training by 2020. Over the next 10 years, the nation will need to accelerate its progress in boosting high school graduation rates five-fold from the rates achieved through 2008.”

The report also doesn’t show a grade distribution for new grads. What I see these days in most of the high schools where I work is a twice-yearly ritual called “the D and F patrol”.

As schools near the end of a semester, administrators tell teachers to make sure they don’t give out Ds and Fs. Kids with horrendous attendance problems skate through. Kids who don’t do much work, get extra credit. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Everyone plays along. More kids graduate.

Most teachers I know, simply change their grades because they don’t want to be singled out for having a poor grade distribution. It could be that the “game-changer” here is an actual change in the game—not better schooling but “grading that graduates”.

Some of the increase, then, in high school graduation rates, could simply be do to this new approach to giving at-risk kids whatever grades they need to walk down the aisle. Online credit recovery programs, also increasing in use and popularity, make it even easier for kids who don’t get their work done to work their way out of school.

I’ve actually watched educators as they reluctantly alter grades in gradebooks and on report cards. While my sample size in this regard is limited to personal experience, high school teachers I have talked to all over the nation report that the “D and F issue” is a prominent post-NCLB wrinkle in their relations with district administrators, and that making sure kids graduate, by whatever means, is now the rule more than the exception.

For their part, district administrators have told me that they are simply trying not to run afoul of district office administrators. My feeling is that Campbell’s Law is at least partially responsible for some of the increase noted in the report cited above.

There’s just a lot of pressure on everyone these days to pump high school graduation numbers. I question, too, whether the goal of 90% high school graduation really is the right goal. Doesn’t that still leave us with a lot of kids going nowhere?


Out of the Factory and into the Game

What really changes the game is better teaching that helps more kids develop meaningful real-world competencies. What gets us out of the factory model is the removal of the traditional programmed scope and sequence curriculum upon which the assembly line is based. The work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative simply retools the factory and gives us a new assembly line.

Standards do not change the factory model; they provide a state-controlled codification of factory model output. New standards give us new ways to shuttle kids down a new assembly line receiving exactly the same adjustments at each stage—whether they need them or not.

Standards, and their accompanying tests and curricula, are the apotheosis of the factory model for they allow the factory to turn out generic minimum competency widgets time after time.

Standards and tests are the modern factory, the retooled factory, the “new normal” factory, but still the factory nonetheless—merely a way of squeezing out a little more productivity from an outdated system that most of us acknowledge has no hope of ever producing what we need.


I’ll Take the Old Normal

Reading the Secretary’s speech, I’m struck by its lack of detail, its incongruities, its pseudo-logic, its hollow business jargon, and its empty political rhetoric.

It seems the Secretary wants to replace the factory model but only with a better factory. He wants to reframe the measurement of failure as success via better scorekeeping. He wants to change the way teachers get paid even though we will have less with which to pay them and we don’t know that paying them more will improve the way they teach.

All the while, we want to “do what works” even though we don’t know what that is, and “do more with less”, even though we don’t know how to do it. If this is the “new , normal”, I’ll take the old normal.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

It is in the Secretary’s nature to take on the leader’s role. But at this point in time, when we need his leadership most, it seems that rather than lead—or even follow—he prefers to get out of the way.

“I want to be clear. I am not recommending a specific course of action today to any state or district. I am urging states and districts start to think more boldly about ways to improve educational productivity.”

There’s that familiar “B” word again. After two years of this, it’s starting to smack of overcompensation. If we have something bold, do we have to keep saying that it’s bold? Or, like “fair and blanced” news from Fox, do we use the modifier as a self-serving rhetorical proxy?

Why would a leader with change on his mind not have recommendations for what those changes might be? The Secretary has access to data, to experts, to his own professional experience; he tells us with confidence and conviction that he “knows what works”. Yet he wants to be clear in not recommending any course of action.

Is this a nod to local control? Or is it a prelude to a shift in responsibility and a way of teeing up the blame for others down the road? The thing speaks for itself.

Saying More With Less?

Finally, the Secretary concludes with the same empty rhetoric with which he began:

“Working together, with candor, courage, and commitment, I believe the New Normal can be a wake up call to America—and a time to rethink how we invest in education for our nation’s children.”

Working together cliches and alliteration we can achieve nothing.

Apparently, improvements in education will be led from here on out not by hard-charging inspirational leaders but the by the forces of economic circumstance. If the “New Normal” is the “wake-up call”; this speech is little more than the annoying whine of a cheap clock radio: “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up, America!” Wake up and do what, Mr. Secretary? Oh yes, do more with less. We’ll get on that right away, sir.

Not-So-Great Moments in Educational Leadership

I have no doubt that Secretary Duncan can be a great leader any time he chooses to be. In this speech, however, leadership is precisely the opposite of what he displays. Great leaders show the people they lead how to transcend difficult circumstances, not how to be coerced by them or to remain trapped within them.

Nothing Secretary Duncan suggests in this speech is different than what he proposed prior to our economic challenges. The difference is in the shift of responsibility. The “New Normal” is the old normal, the oldest of normals. One of our presidents called it passing the buck—but at least he said the buck stopped with him.

Secretary Duncan, however, is out of bucks. And clearly, he is out of answers as well. In times of hardship, people look to their leaders for inspiration, not exculpation. Is this speeach an attempt provide the former or seek the latter?

The “L” Word

Secretary Duncan is laying the groundwork that will protect his legacy by shielding himself from future scrutiny. Instead of stepping up and shouldering the responsibility of leading our education nation through tough times, he tees up teachers and states to take the hit down the road.

The actual work of improving education will now, apparently, be led by the rest of us with fewer resources and more platitudes about belt tightening, “force multipliers”, and “doing what works”.

More than anything, education needs a culture of accountability and personal ownership. But this cultural shift must be led from the top. If Secretary Duncan can pass the buck, why can’t states? Why can’t districts? Why can’t teachers? Why can’t families?

The answer to our problems in not doing more with less, it’s being more than we’ve been, it’s bringing more of what makes us great to a greater challenge, it’s finding more within ourselves because someone like our Secretary is showing us where it is.

The Leadership We Need

Few people in politics and policy seem to consider the on-the-ground realities of their proposals or their posture. Those of us who educate children are fed up with the lack of leadership we have been subjected to in recent decades.

We’re tired, frustrated, and oh so weary of “reform”. Secretary Duncan’s speech seems highly unlikely to change this or to inspire anyone to do more with less.

We want our leaders to step up and embrace the accountability they heap upon us. When Secretary Duncan chooses to do this, we will respond. But people who have been doing more with less all their lives are unlikely to be moved by this message when there will be even less of less and even more that must be done with it.

Everything Old is New Again

If Secretary Duncan’s speech is any indication, the “new normal” will be the “old normal” with new jargon, new metaphors, and new excuses. What won’t be new is who gets blamed for the failures that will proliferate on the Secretary’s watch. Teachers will take most of the heat, followed by incorrigible children, and their irresponsible families. This is normal, too.

Like it or not, teaching quality is the #1 in-school factor in student achievement. We have almost four million teachers in our system. We need them. They are the key.

But thanks to educational leaders like Secretary Duncan, Ms. Rhee, and Mr. Klein, and filmmakers like Mr. Guggenheim, America isn’t bringing apples to school for teachers anymore—unless there the ones with the razor blades in them.

The New Normal Should Be a New Course

Someone—and it should be Secretary Duncan—needs to chart a new course in the relationship between America and it’s educational workforce. This speech, like others he has given, will make that relationship worse.

To energize our education nation for a tough task ahead, Secretary Duncan needs to let the country know that he is just as excited about reform now, when he has no money to spend, as he was when he was flush.

Nobody likes to hear that the party’s over. But the guy who’s throwing it should at least stick around to clean up the mess. Beating a hasty exit, and telling everyone else to get used to the “new normal”, is bad form and poor leadership.

If Secretary Duncan thinks educators should be doing more with less, he would be smarter to make recommendations than to coyly withhold them. Then again, if he doesn’t have the goods, perhaps he shouldn’t make the shoulds.

When leaders try to lead with vague ideas, stale jargon, and sloppy metaphors, they forfeit credibility. We need a Secretary of Education we can believe in—and one who believes in us.

Show Us How

If times are going to be tough for educators during a period when our nation is going to be asking more of them, it would help if the leader of our education system lead the way in showing us how to get the job done.

When Secretary Duncan declares a new era of challenge in education and then withholds specific recommendations about how to meet that challenge, he is not being helpful.

Secretary Duncan’s term in office has been characterized by unprecedented action. But it’s simply far too early to tell if these efforts will make a difference. His approach has been stimulating but also divisive.

Too often, however, (and this speech is an example), he has failed to demonstrate a knowledge of the all-important intersection of policy and practice. That is, he doesn’t seem to account for how his ideas will play out over the long haul in our nation’s districts, schools, and classrooms.

What’s Left Behind?

Secretary Duncan’s struggle in this speech to articulate specific recommendations is emblematic of his term as Secretary—he has many actions he wants to take but no overall vision of how those actions will play out to create a better system.

His action-oriented approach has certainly received high praise in Washington and in the business community, but it is impossible to know yet whether it has been successful. As the old saying goes, “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”

Our editor asks precisely the right question when he writes, “Doing More With Less: What’s the Plan?” Indeed, what is the plan? Or is having no plan part of the “new normal”, too?

Secretary Duncan seems to think we’ve come to the end of the era of “more” in education. While I think he’s being overly dramatic when he coins and capitalizes a phrase like “New Normal”, it’s probably true that, as one past president might have said, “the era of big education is over.”

Whether we’re in a new era or not is an issue for historians. Right now, we need leadership and solutions—two things that seem to have been left behind in this speech.

Secretary Duncan adds to the growing voices that are calling for the K-12 local education system to find ways to do more with less. That's a timely warning by the nation's education leader to all states and communities in this new austere environment.

It’s a reality that we have seen coming in Ohio for some time. KnowledgeWorks subsidiary Ohio Education Matters has been studying ways the state can enact innovative education reform against an increasingly bleak budgetary picture through its Ohio Smart Schools initiative.

As part of this “new normal,” Secretary Duncan can encourage federal and state governments that oversee education to help lead local educators out of the crisis. They can provide the tools, structures, guidance, flexibility and encouragement that communities need to absorb the cuts and reapply the resources they have to better support the kind of instruction that will provide the skills and knowledge learners need to become college and career ready. That's not going to happen in every community without changes in the entire system that organizes and governs education.

The role of the federal and state government must be about providing flexibility for local educators to meet the needs of learners in a variety of ways, all toward reaching the same achievement goals established by state and federal laws. Being tight on means and on results won't work with states and localities strapped for resources. Efforts to find ways to address roadblocks that exist in local collective bargaining agreements should also be accompanied by efforts to find ways to eliminate or reduce federal and state mandates that cause districts to spend dollars in restrictive ways. With mandates and cuts, who could blame local educators for shrugging their shoulders and giving up or lashing out at the unfairness heaped upon them?

So, federal and state government can help by easing up on rules and restrictions around the use of federal and state money -- but still maintaining tight control on accountability for results. Still, we find that flexibility is not enough. Local communities need new structures to better tap into community resources and strengths, which will broaden the available resources for children. In Ohio, many great examples of local P-16 initiatives exist that are doing just that, but the state does not officially recognize them through statute and does little to encourage their creation and sustainability.

More local districts say they are willing to share services and make more purchases cooperatively with others, but more opportunities need to be provided by the states through structures that take advantage of economies of scale.

And local educators and communities need even more ideas, tools and data to cuts costs, find efficiencies, and spur new ways to improve academic achievement. For instance, even though districts can stretch dollars farther by providing students access to online courses for credit, Ohio superintendents surveyed last month reported only 6 percent of students in Ohio took online courses for credit in the last year.

Federal and state governments can and should do even more to encourage districts and communities to adopt best practices and research-based approaches to instruction and spurring the adoption of innovative and creative practices. Much is known about how children learn and how to provide instruction to meet their needs for the future, but diffusion and adoption of that knowledge and those practices is challenging.

As Secretary Duncan noted, smaller class sizes may need to give way to using resources in different ways with larger classes. But the research on smaller classes was never just about smallness -- it was also about taking advantage of the small numbers to use instructional methods that personalized instruction for students. In a new normal that may include larger class sizes, school districts should be encouraged to take advantage of technology that can help teachers and students to well. Technologies such as mobile learning devices can help do just that at a fraction of the cost of laptops and wireless access.

As many of my colleagues in this space have expressed, the opportunity to lead differently is clear and present in the world of the “new normal.”

In this economy can we really afford to redesign our traditional teacher preparation, professional-development and compensation programs? Should we? Let’s use the “new normal” as an opportunity to change the status quo.

We can use the current economic climate as an opportunity to innovate. Let’s explore a staffing model that empowers teachers by playing to their strengths while simultaneously creating alternative staffing solutions that could save states and districts millions of dollars. Instead of adding on, let’s branch out.

If we want more students to achieve, we need to let teachers become specialists. We can build a staffing model that gives teachers the flexibility to specialize in one or more aspects of a child’s education, and then apply that expertise in a team-based environment allowing them to implement approaches that fit that child’s learning style and strengths.

Our schools can foster an environment of strategically shared leadership and responsibilities by turning to a “neo-differentiated” staffing model. Under this model, each faculty member’s job description is re-engineered and experts from the community are brought in for part of the day. This part-time staffing provides resources for students, reduces overhead and frees up time for teachers to apply their specialized expertise to student learning. By streamlining the process, we get students the services and supports they need, giving more children more of a chance to succeed. And we better capitalize on the talent, knowledge, and skills of teachers, improving their ability to provide effective instruction and consequently, increasing their professional satisfaction.

With a new student-centered approach to learning, coupled with the integration of services at the school buildings, teams of professionals can more easily meet and discuss the emotional, health and social components of their students’ learning all at once.

Imagine the power of teachers joining forces to work in cohorts. These “teaching teams” could get together every day during the students’ lunchtime or recess or electives to discuss how the days’ instruction went, the evidence of student learning they had gathered, and how the next day’s instruction should go. One instructional leader (either a full-time certified teacher or an administrator who was once a teacher) would be responsible for these content teams. Sometimes these meetings would involve planning with a district curriculum or assessment specialist, or a stipend-paid expert from the community (such as NASA scientists, telecommunications specialists, authors, etc.). With their powers combined, practitioners could attend to all the needs of their students.

Far fetched? This model does require dramatic changes in how teachers’ work is arranged and in the culture of the school. But it is already happening. Let’s take a lesson from the School of One. Born out of the New York City Department of Education’s Division of Human Capital, the School of One promises a new system of staffing in which all teachers teach to their exact areas of strength. While one educator may excel at small-group instruction, another may find that her skills lie in large-group teaching. Others still concentrate on virtual tutoring, or overseeing group collaboration. Because the school is designed to teach all its subjects in all of these modalities at once, the faculty goes from being a roster of individual generalists to a strong team of practitioner-specialists.

School of One Founder Joel Rose explains that the concept of “breaking down the walls of the classroom” helps to increase teacher accountability and tap into the resources of all teachers, all the time. Further, because the school classrooms are all housed in a renovated school library, the teachers are together every minute of the day. Like the School of One, the team-based approach advocated in the “neo-differentiated” staffing model creates the space in the curriculum and time in the day to allow meaningful student-centered conversations to flourish.

Teachers might have to work longer days, but maybe they wouldn’t mind if they were being treated the way they have always deserved: like they are truly effective with their students and are part of a professional team.

We applaud secretary Duncan’s call for “transformational change.” Tough fiscal times can either be a grim time for public education where we cut back on investments and “do less with less,” or we can use budget pressure to tackle outmoded practices and unwieldy cost structures. Today, we have new understanding of how children learn; new ways to measure learning; the workforce has changed along with our understanding of how to organize work; and we have new technologies to support learning. What can public school systems do now to benefit from our new knowledge and technology and at the same time make better use of resources?

Through our partnerships with urban districts, ERS has identified four strategies that get at the heart of restructuring existing resources in ways that could both reduce costs now and over time as well as improve outcomes.

1. Move away from “one size fits all” class size models. Instead, target individual attention to address priority student needs.

Class size has become the ubiquitous measure of school quality—as the indicator of how much individual attention students receive. It works, because it is easier to measure and describe than teaching effectiveness. But, we find that rigid class size mandates often work against teaching effectiveness. Why? Because they force the automatic addition of more staff rather than investments in teaching effectiveness or thoughtful targeting of individual attention. High-performing schools are breaking away from the single teacher, single classroom, all day model. These schools group students in different ways throughout the day, week and over their career, depending on their needs and the subject matter. Some groups might even be much larger than typical class size mandates, in order to match them with teachers who have the right skills or because the lessons or subjects don’t demand small class sizes. Other students might work independently or in small student-led groups. Districts and states can help to redirect individual attention to priority areas by getting rid of rigid class size mandates and raising class size targets strategically in higher grades and non-core subjects. They can articulate trade-offs between class size and teaching effectiveness and leverage the most effective teachers by making them responsible for more students and compensating them accordingly.

2. Redesign special education practices to shift funds toward early intervention and increased individual attention for all students.

The high cost of special education is widely understood. But, most people are not aware of the large differences across states and districts in the percent of students classified in special education programs. Research also shows how damaging inappropriate placement can be. Funding incentives currently encourage classification of students to the most restrictive settings. Further, poorly understood “maintenance of effort” requirements that appear to require districts to keep special education spending levels the same from year to year combine with state and district staffing requirements to make it hard for districts to manage these costs. But, districts must work together with states to examine their special education placement and the cost-effectiveness of their service models. The goal should be to shift resources toward proven early intervention models, as well as ongoing targeted attention that addresses gaps in the skill levels of all students including those with special needs.

3. Make every minute count by matching instructional time to academic priorities.

There is much discussion about the need to add time for students who need it—but much less discussion about using existing time well. We find that districts and schools rarely manage time as a resource and certainly don’t encourage schools to schedule time to match student and subject needs. We find big differences across schools in the amount of time they schedule for instruction of any kind. In most school systems, students spend less and less time on core subjects as they move through school. We also find that the neediest students often spend the least time of all on core academics—especially by 12th grade. State and contract requirements that stipulate school time by subject, including PE, music and art, create unproductive trade-offs. For example, to spend more time on math, schools must create after-school add-on programs rather than find ways to provide PE, music and art at potentially lower cost and higher quality.

4. Restructure compensation to incent and reward increased teacher responsibility and results.

Current teacher compensation structures reward years on the job and additional coursework, even though neither of these measures are highly correlated to student success. School systems must realign teacher salaries and incentives to attract and keep the best and brightest, and promote professional growth, teamwork, responsibility, student performance, and contribution toward learning. In addition, districts can leverage compensation spending by managing the teaching work-force mix and differentiating instructional roles.

If you look at just about any sector from manufacturing to service to communications, you see a workplace and delivery system that has completely changed over the last three decades. But when you look at American public schools, they look almost exactly the same except with more staff outside the regular classroom, a few computers and some smart boards for the lucky few. Today’s tough times make now the moment to dismantle outmoded cost-structures and to take bold actions so our school systems reflect and support what we know about learning and now have the capacity to deliver.

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Less with more? That’s a cliché. (No disrespect intended.) The reality is that the content of our 6-12 curriculum has outlived its shelf life. We need new methods, yes—but new methods are only effective with new content. Young people will soon see through our repackaging if we continue to teach the same old outdated topics. We can personalize learning, differentiate instruction, come up with digital courses (all things I am highly attuned to and specifically working with) but unless what we are teaching has purpose and meaning for young people, it won’t matter.

We teach the same topics in our schools today that we taught over one hundred years ago. Where did these subjects come from? How did we choose what to teach? In 1892, a group of ten university academics, known as the Committee of Ten, met to discern what standards would be necessary for admission to the nation’s colleges and universities. Then president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot chaired the committee. Along with the nine others, he set out to develop a national curriculum intended to prepare students for entry into Harvard and similar institutions of higher education. This group convened to address a growing concern that the high school curriculum catered to two kinds of students; the college bound and those for whom high school was the terminal point in education. Schools taught basic arithmetic alongside classical Latin, causing much debate over the purpose of education. Was it to prepare children for college or for the labor market? Of course, many of the same debates continue today. Is college necessary? Is high school even necessary? What is important to know? In 1892, Charles Eliot and his committee narrowed the scope of the curriculum by reducing the number of courses from between fifteen and twenty to six or eight, and broadened the sequence by making the study of each course occur over several years. Today, in most schools in the United States, we still follow the same regimen. Why, for example, do we arrange history courses as a march through the world’s wars?

Why not teach it as a march through the history of scientific invention? Why do we teach trigonometry, a subject few people will use in their lives, instead of statistics, a topic that is valuable in many professions? Why is Romeo and Juliet taught in ninth grade and Macbeth in tenth grade? Why don’t we learn how we govern our local communities or where the food in our grocery stores comes from? Who determines what is important, and is the same thing important for everyone? Is what was important ten years ago still important today? Part of the reason today’s children are not motivated in school is that they do not understand why they need to learn the things we teach them. Either do we adults! The first top on the great reform train needs to be a great rethinking of the work of the Committee of Ten. Until we address what and why-- how is less important. This discussion will save hundreds of millions of dollars in start-up investments and restructuring. Content is the king of all school reform.

So ... our tough economic times require us to cut back on education spending. And this will be a good thing because it requires us to embark on some "creative destruction". One wonders (well, one really doesn't, actually) whether the same creativity will be benevolently offered toward military spending, which has jumped 68% since 2001 even without counting the spending on the two wars (119% if we do count them). Where's the "new normal" when it comes to aircraft carriers? One wonders also why well-endowed charter school CMO chains don't want to turn away hedge fund philanthropic dollars, tighten their belts, and take advantage of the opportunity-in-crisis that awaits.

There's enormous scope for productivity in K-12 education -- if people are willing to step outside the traditional 'givens'.

One obvious approach is to get more effort from the workers that don't get paid: the students. Traditionally the policy discussion has seen the teacher as the worker on the job -- as if "to learn" were a transitive verb. This makes school a labor-intensive and therefore expensive operation.

But surely the student is a co-worker on that job. So find ways to increase student-effort.

Effort requires motivation. So find ways to increase student-motivation. The effort now directed at expanding digital technology is a logical step in that direction.

A second approach -- also aided by expanding digital technology -- is to personalize student learning. This makes it possible to change the pace of student work, so that those who can go faster do go faster and those who need more time get more time. Learning should improve on both dimensions. With better results productivity improves.

A third, building off the first two, is then to move more young people on to further education or into work at about age 16 -- as long recommended by John Goodlad and others. Tell a legislator some time: "We have 75,000 seniors and 75,000 juniors. We spend about $10,000 on each. Multiply $10,000 by 150,000 and look at the number you get. And that's one year." (These are the current numbers for my state.) Clearly there are gains to be had along this line.

Good for starters!

The usual suspects bemoaning the "new normal" as a blow to school improvement. Unions, superintendents, and school boards are asking how we can possibly drive improvement without more dollars. Short answer: Take a quick look at my new book, Stretching the School Dollar (published in September by Harvard Education Press). In it, contributors like Stacey Childress, Steven Wilson, and John Chubb make a compelling case that scools can educate students more effectively than they do now, for less money, by making better use of staff, technology, and management tools.

Longer answer: For three generations, we've spent more dollars on K-12 schooling each year than we did the year before. The problem with this is that no one makes tough choices in flush times. I don't care if you're a tough-minded for-profit CEO or a cuddly koala of a nonprofit executive; nobody is eager to squeeze salaries, shut down inefficient programs, seek out savings, or trim employees when they can avoid it. A manager who tries when times are good is just a mean-spirited S.O.B. who alienates staff and creates disruptions.

This is why tough times can be so healthful for organizations. They make possible the occasional pruning. They allow--heck, they prod--managers to tackle problems that otherwise get swept under the carpet. This permits organizations to regain their fighting trim, reexamine priorities, and create a leaner culture focused on productivity and performance. Unfortunately, most districts haven't had a meaningful house cleaning in decades. In my experience, most are careless about deploying talent, undisciplined at the negotiating table, lax about pursuing operational efficiencies, and generally in need of a severe belt-tightening. This is about using resources better but also about the lethargy that takes root in bloated bureaucracies, and how efficiency-hungry organizations attract and energize talent.

During the tumultuous past decade, schools have added adults at about twice the rate they've added kids. Even hard-charging superintendents spend little time engaged in scrubbing; instead, they favor reform strategies that entail stacking new dollars atop existing commitments and programs. Indeed, even in the midst of the current crunch, schools have been largely buffered. For instance, the nonpartisan Rockefeller Institute reported in July that private sector employment had fallen more than six percent since December, that most state and local employment was down just one to two percent--but that education-related state employment was up by two percent.

So long as the bucks keep coming in, even union leaders who might be tempted to revisit existing contracts know that they will look like suckers and softies if they do so-- unless they walk away with a king's ransom. Meanwhile, there's a natural temptation for district officials to duck cuts and instead rely on the old "closing the Washington Monument" strategy so long as they can shake loose new dollars (the strategy so-named when President Bill Clinton famously ordered highly visible national parks and monuments shut down 15 years ago during his budget standoff with the Gingrich Republicans). By making a big, visible fuss and threatening to cut athletics or AP, district officials normally get the community to pony up new dollars.

All of this is especially critical because we're nowhere near the crest of the mountain on this thing. We're really just in the foothills. Given that property valuations are lagged by several years, that states are eyeballing substantial new healthcare obligations, that pensions are massively underfunded, and that states have squeezed services across the board in the past couple years, K-12 is looking at a half-decade or more of tight budgets. Given that, it's time for those of us in schooling to stop asking whether it's fair to ask us to do better with less and to start figuring out how to make that happen.

GM was reborn this week after a massive federal bailout. The three year saga is a reminder of the creative destruction of the market now whipsawed by derivative accelerants that we don’t yet fully understand.

A learning scientist at another industrial giant pointed to GM as an example of organizational mortality and the need for constant renewal. Committed to an innovative agenda, they spend 13% of their budget on individual, organizational, and community learning.

“When we look at our public education system, we see a 50 year decline” said the scientist, “a vicious cycle of decay.” “We are concerned about the lack of STEM students and stagnant achievement levels.” [Note: a reader objected to the '50 year decline' quote; it's probably an overstatement but it's fair to say that results have been frustratingly stagnant on many measures for several decades despite increased expenditure.]

These guys study complex adaptive systems. They know more about individual and organizational learning than a university faculty. They are willing to challenge any unproductive underlying assumption and abandon any ineffective practice to renew the organization. We could use a little more of that in public education–and this week, Duncan delivered.

The Secretary of Education gave what may have been his most important speech this week at a small AEI event—it’s worth watching. Duncan began outlining the “new normal”—persistently low tax revenues and the need to do more with less. [It's worth noting that flat revenue is not just treading water; nearly all district costs are driven by long term contracts which ratchet up each year, so most will be facing annual cuts for years to come.]

Duncan pleaded not to cut back days, instructional time, art, PE, or foreign languages, and not to lay off talented new teachers. Duncan mentioned some standard strategies like closing under enrolled schools, cut bus routes, and reducing central office.

The remarkable part of Duncan’s speech was his case for “transformational change,” rethinking “structure and delivery” and “explore productive alternatives.”

This was the first time a U.S. Education Secretary recognized the potential for “transformational productivity,” the first time a secretary attacked the basic system architecture as “a century old factory model—the wrong model for 21st century.”

Duncan railed against seat time requirements, antiquated compensation systems, and inequitable school finance.

He called for the smart use of technology—a potential “force multiplier”—online tools and virtual schools. Duncan suggested that good teachers with good tools could support larger class sizes.

Duncan said, “The new normal can be a wake up call” but admitted that progress would take courageous state and local leaders.

We largely missed the opportunity-in-crisis afforded by the Great Recession, but the lingering “new normal” may force a generation of education leaders to address new challenges in new ways.