Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The following was posted on Education Gadfly last week:

Secretary Duncan and his team were mobbed the other day by agitated parents and kids protesting the closing of public schools around the land. Though Uncle Sam has no real control over this, it's true that Duncan came to Washington promising to close (or overhaul) a thousand schools a year and, more recently, has been pressing for radical action in the lowest-performing 5 percent—i.e., about 5000 schools. Actual data in this realm are scarce, but NCES reports roughly a thousand closings a year among “regular” public schools (meaning that, in one sense, Duncan's promise is being kept, though not by him), as well as who knows how many charter and private schools that bite the dust. But even if the total is closer to

I don't have much new to contribute, except to note that, since I wrote the book our states and districts have been afflicted with major budgetary challenges (as, obviously, has the federal government), and there is much to be said for redirecting existing public pre-K expenditures--Headstart above all--in more promising directions.

It's also worth noting that the Common Core standards kick in in kindergarten and it will soon be more important than ever that kids arrive kindergarten-READY. Which is NOT an argument for universalizing the publicly-financed pre-K experience. It IS an argument for targeting available resources on those youngsters who are least likely, under current circumstances, to be kindergarten-ready. Which unfortunately includes a great many kids who will have passed through existing pre-K programs without having become kindergarten-ready, due in considerable part to the fact that many existing programs--again beginning with Headstart--do not take seriously the cognitive/academic side of their school-readiness obligations.

Besides the bo

Posted last week on Flypaper.

As President of the AFT, the late Albert Shanker was instrumental in creating the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and much else in the education-reform world. Now Randi Weingarten is trying—earnestly and imaginatively—to return the organization and its (present) leader to the pantheon of real reformers.

Their new and much-ballyhooed proposal, contained in a report titled Raising the Bar, revives the Shanker-era idea of a “bar exam” for entering teachers—and charges the NBPTS with putting it into practice.

Andy Rotherham came out within hours with multiple doubts, some of which worry me, too. But let’s start by crediting Ms

There may still be some places in America--most likely tranquil suburbs and small towns--where the elected local school board places kids' interests first and attract the community's leading citizens to engage in selfless policymaking on behalf of the commonweal. That was, more or less, the theory behind elected school boards--that plus the fact that when they were "invented" the local community covered nearly all the costs of its schools.

But there cannot be many such places today and you surely will not find them in urban America. In those places, the elected school board is generally dominated by (a) aspiring politicians for whom this is a stepping stone to higher office, (b) friends of the teachers union (often retired teachers themselves) dedicated to ensuring that the grownups' interests come first, and (c) individuals with various single-minded causes and grudges that they seek to impose on the entire community.

If you want chapter and verse, as well as provocative alternative approaches to governing our schools, check out Andy Smarick's excell

You're dead right about the three "cherished concepts". This specific plan will probably crash and burn on account of the difficulty in reaching agreement on the third, namely funding from Congress. But the first two concepts deserve plaudits, the more so coming from a Democratic administration. When it comes to reforming education, in my view, competitive grants are far better than block grants and formula grants. Let places that actually WANT to make a given change apply for the wherewithal to do so. And bravo for Messrs. Duncan and Obama for sticking with the principle of paying excellent teachers more--and for distinguishing between those who are really good and those who aren't. During an election season, such a plan also brings the administration twin political benefits: seeking more money of any sort for teachers will play well with that part of the "base"; differentiating among them won't thrill the teachers themselves but will likely appeal to at least a few people who don't love the teacher unions and do believe in recognizing and rewarding

As Jay Mathews perceptively observed over the weekend, and as others of us have been pointing out for a while, the Obama-Duncan team didn't leave a heckuva lot of education-reform terrain for Mitt Romney to occupy except for variations on the theme of vouchers. And occupy it he has done. But "voucherizing Title I" is not a new idea. I recall working with Bill Bennett on it—and Reagan then proposed it—a quarter century ago. Getting such a major change enacted would, I think, hinge not only on Governor Romney reaching the Oval Office but also on a GOP sweep in both houses of Congress. But getting it fully considered is well worth doing.

As America nears the half-century mark with Title I, we can fairly conclude that pumping all this money into districts to boost the budgets of schools serving disadvantaged kids hasn't done those kids much good, though it has surely been welcomed by revenue-hungry

This is all overwrought on all sides. The irony in the specific episode is that a handful of anti-Common Core activists have been doing their level best to persuade ALEC, generally a hotbed of libertarianism, to play the heavy and push (even require) states to forsake the Common Core. In truth, states are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves whether the Common Core is the way to go in English and math standards. It's VOLUNTARY. (Admittedly, Secretary Duncan didn't help when he used the lure of federal dollars and waivers to "incentivize" states to embrace it.) Our own (Fordham) analysis indicated that the Common Core standards are superior, on their substantive merits, to those in use in most states. But that doesn't mean states should necessarily switch to them--and if they're not going to be serious about implementing and then assessing them there's not much point. But, to repeat, it's voluntary. States are sovereign. A handful of states (led by Texas and Virginia) pointedly declared that they have no intention of adopting the Common Core. Most said they would

The greatest problem with our policies toward principals isn’t that we hold them responsible for too much, too quickly, it’s that we don’t give them the power to accomplish much at all.
A school head today is accountable for student achievement, discipline, the quality of instruction, leading the staff team, and much, much more. Yet that same principal controls only a fragment of his school's budget, has little say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself.
How has it come to this and why does this folly persist?
A dysfunctional governance structure for public education pays homage to "local control" yet turns over management to burgeoning central office bureaucracies, rather than vesting real control at the level closest to teachers, students, and parents.
We’ve also layered so many responsibilities onto our schools that imparting basic skills and essential knowledge has nearly vanished under efforts to rectify injustice, foster

When the federal goal is simply to distribute money, formula grants (based on, say, the number of disabled or low-income kids) are fine. When the goal is "reform" of one kind or another, however, competitive grants are much to be preferred--provided, of course, that the reform is worth making and that the competition is properly conducted. That gets riskier during an election year, to be sure, and even more so in an election year when the administration plainly craves to re-endear itself to teachers and their unions.

We can safely assume that that impulse is much of the backdrop to the proposed "RESPECT" program--which means spotlights must be carefully trained on the Education Department (assuming it gets such an appropriation at all!) to see what criteria and processes are used to determine which states get how much money for what sorts of programs.

On the other hand, Messrs. Duncan and Obama have been generally solid on teacher-related reforms, including how they should be prepared, evaluated and compensated. It's true that a lot of Republic

I recently wrote on the importance of vocational education in Education Gadfly:

What are the current, viable alternatives to college? In a perfect world, what alternatives should there be? Could employers be more open to looking at different kinds of job candidates? If so, how? Can the K-12 education system improve enough to make college less of a necessity? Are we becoming a snob nation?

I’m a huge fan of high-quality liberal-arts education for everybody and really do think it would go far to prepare better citizens, neighbors, and consumer/transmitters of America’s cultural heritage and democratic underpinnings. I’m also an acolyte of E.D. Hirsch and his core point that everyone—especially poor kids—needs to be culturally literate as well as equipped with the 3 R’s (though he emphasizes that his focus is K-8, not

Nobody ever said--or should have said--that better standards per se will boost student achievement or school performance. Huge challenges await any (serious) academic standards on the implementation, assessment and accountability fronts. But it's a bunch better to have standards worth attaining, rigorous standards set forth with enough specificity and clarity (and content) to provide real guidance to curriculum designers, classroom teachers, test developers and more. I commented further on the Brookings (Brown Center) report in last week's Education Gadfly.

The Common Core state standards (for English/language arts and math) are no panacea but they represent a far better destination for U.S. schools than those that most states set on their own. We at Fordham have been monitoring and evaluating state academic standards for eons and that's where we come out. But they're no panacea--and they're fraught with three big

Here's a response from Mike Petrilli, the Fordham Institute's executive vice president:

With a week to go until the February 21 deadline for the second round of Secretary Duncan’s ESEA Waiverpalooza, states nationwide are studying the results of Round One to figure out what federal officials did—and didn’t—approve. And they are asking themselves a question: Is it even worth it? (A few states—including California and Pennsylvania have already decided: no.)

In the end, I suspect that most of the 28 states that have indicated an interest in a waiver will file for one, if only because, by this point, they’ve already sunk thousands of man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars into the process. And some of the flexibility provided by the feds to the first t

Pretty much everybody favors better “civics education” in our schools and colleges. Pretty much everybody who thinks about such matters is alarmed that barely a quarter of U.S. school kids were at or above the “proficient” level on the 2010 NAEP assessment of civics—and that achievement at the twelfth- grade level is slipping even though just about all students “take civics” in high school. Almost everyone has encountered ample examples of students (and adults!) who cannot answer the most rudimentary questions about how the government is organized, what “separation of powers” or “checks and balances” means, how many senators their states have (much less their names), and more.

It is, indeed, a modern platitude that “we must do something to improve Americans’ knowledge of civics and government.”

But there is a problem in civics education, a sort of dividing line, about which there is far less agreement across society. On one side, we find an emphasis on infusing kids with basic kno

The following is from Mike Petrilli, Fordham's executive vice president:

The federal law that everybody loves to hate turns ten today. Here’s what to think about it: It worked! As Mark Schneider shows in his recent paper for Fordham—and as Eric Hanushek and others demonstrated before him—poor, minority, and low-achieving students made huge progress in math, and sizable progress in reading, during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their most recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate all-time highs for most grades and subjects. These students are typically performing two grade levels ahead of where their peers were fifteen years ago in math, and are reading at least one grade-level higher. So how to explain these historic gains? While we can’t draw causal conclusions from NAEP, w

At least on alternate Thurdays, I'm some sort of a Republican, but I'm generally approving of Race to the Top and kindred competitive approaches to stimulating education reform. Reform cannot really be mandated--the signal failing of NCLB's and its architects--but it can be (in today's jargon) incentivized. And making the incentives scarce and competitive is a good thing.

There is, of course, a risk that states (or districts, whatever) will promise to do things if they get the money and then not keep their promise (either because they don't win the money or because they do win but then slack off, there being not much of an enforcement mechanism attached).

I still think this is a more promising approach for Washington than expecting either mandates or formula grants to yield real reform.

As for what the future holds, that depends a great deal on the 2012 election outcome, doesn't it?

For me, let mandates be used for "musts" like civil rights enforcement. Let formula grants be used to transfer resources from one place (or mission) to ano

Some things are simply beyond Uncle Sam's reach, and one of those is competent enforcement of spending comparability in the absence of state/district school budget and financing based on KIDS rather than GROWN-UPS. If every public-education dollar (state, district, federal) to which a youngster is entitled followed him/her to the school that he/she actually attended, to be allocated and expended AT that school, this problem would go away--and faster and more dramatically if this student funding were "weighted," i.e. adjusted according to the individual student's needs and circumstances. Couple that with a transparent system for tracking dollars in (and out) of schools and comparing them across schools and jurisdictions, and the comparability challenge is readily overcome. (For what it's worth, we at Fordham have repeatedly urged "weighted student funding"--see for example, http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2006/200606_fundthechild/FundtheChil

NCLB-as-we-know-it has few defenders nowadays--Fawn spoke with two of the most prominent--not least because the center of education-reform gravity has swiftly moved from Washington to the state capitals. Secretary Spellings and Congressman Miller usefully remind us not to neglect low-achieving kids, and we know that there are scads of them, even judging by the weak expectations and flabby standards that most states have set. But a bunch of kids are well above proficient, too--around thirty percent when gauged even by NAEP's demanding norms. NCLB essentially ignored them, despite the plain fact that the United States can never strengthen its competitive position or boost its economy and job creation only by lifting the bottom of the achievement distribution. Common Core challenges us to raise our expectations. Remarkably, the states have pulled it off so far with almost no federal involvement. (This alarms some folks with a Potomacentric view of the world.) To be sure, we cannot yet know whether the twin consortia now designing new assessments will be able to reach consensus on

Here's a response from Mike Petrilli, the Fordham Institute's executive vice president:

Halloween was fun for the kids, but soon after came every education wonk’s favorite holiday: NAEP release day! Here are some thoughts on the trends in reading.

The big news is that we finally eked out some statistically significant progress in 8th-grade reading. This goal has eluded us before, and has led commentators such as E.D. Hirsch to note that we’re not doing enough to build kids’ content knowledge and vocabulary. Initiatives like Reading First might have helped our youngsters to decode, goes the argument, but that’s not enough to create strong readers, especially as kids get older.

That’s still true, I think, but the NAEP results might indicate that those decoding skills are nothing to scoff at. The middle schoolers who took the NAEP last spring were in first grade in 2004–the heyday of Reading First implementation. It’s possible that scientifically-based reading instruction got them off to a better start as reade

Here is a comment from Mike Petrilli, Fordham Institute executive vice president:

It sure wasn't pretty, but Harkin-Enzi's out of committee

The Senate HELP committee voted last week to send the Harkin-Enzi ESEA bill to the floor. It passed 15-7, with support from all of the Democrats and three Republicans (Mike Enzi, Lamar Alexander, and Mark Kirk). Now, let the analysis begin! Here are five thoughts:

1. This is a big deal, folks. The ESEA reauthorization process hasn’t gotten this far since–well, ever. In 2007 the House education committee floated a draft bill which then died an ignominious death. The Senate HELP committee has never produced a bill. So to have a comprehensive bill marked up and sent to the floor represents a significant milestone.

2. President Obama and Secretary Duncan deserve credit for spurring the Senate into act

The following is from Mike Petrilli, Fordham's executive vice-president:

We finally have a serious, thoughtful ESEA reauthorization proposal in the Senate, one that should gain support from both sides of the aisle and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. But here’s a warning: it’s not the bill that scheduled to be marked up tomorrow.

No, that bill, authored by Senate education committee chairman Tom Harkin and ranking member Mike Enzi, is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that should alarm folks on the right and the left.

And sure enough, progressives have already made their opinions clear on why the bill should be stopped dead in its tracks. But it should offend conservatives (including the Reform Realists among us) too, though for very different reasons. Such conservatives should back the aforementioned

The Obama administration’s new waiver plan doesn’t officially repeal the No Child Left Behind Act, but it is tantamount to making large-scale amendments to it. Which it does unilaterally, without even a thumbs-up from Congress.

Though the specific conditions that the White House and Secretary Duncan are attaching to statewide “flexibility waivers” are consistent with the administration’s long-standing "blueprint" for reauthorizing NCLB, and also happen to be conditions that I think generally have merit, they do amount to changing the law, not just waiving it. This raises constitutional as well as statutory issues — though the administration’s response, not surprisingly or implausibly, is that “if a do-nothing Congress won’t act to solve problems, we’ll solve them ourselves as best we can.”

Yet the changes themselves — at least their timing and high-profile release — are motivated at least as much by election-year political considerations as by policy. Thi

(Due to a National Journal error, a comment written by the American Association of School Administrators was originally posted under Chester Finn's name. The following is the correct post for Mr. Finn.)

As money gets tighter, flexibility in the use of available dollars becomes ever more important. It never made much sense to "silo" federal education funds into so many separate categorical programs, and it makes less sense today. The quest for "flexibility" in the use of federal dollars is gaining ground, and not just because Republicans favor it. What, after all, is Secretary Duncan's enthusiasm for "waivers" about if not granting flexibility to districts and states that current laws and regulations don't allow. You could say he's trying to clean up behind the NCLB elephant and that would be correct--but that's also what John Kline is doing in his way.

The stickiest wicket is whether flexibility includes the right to transfer Title I dollars from low-income schools to other uses. (Transferring money INTO Title I is a no-brainer--as

There is surely no reason not to "start with charter schools" but it would be a pity if we ended there. It's obviously better for a fundamentally dysfunctional Congress to do a handful of worthwhile things that it can agree on than for it to do nothing at all. But anybody who has spent time in the charter space knows that, while these schools can do much good for kids and communities, they aren't all educational successes and they're surely no panacea. Doing charters right means focusing as directly on their freedom, resourcing, accountability and quality as on their numbers, but Washington's leverage here is limited. Done right, a "portfolio" of charters COULD begin to substitute for traditional bureaucratic school systems and that's worth trying to make happen. But Uncle Sam's leverage is again limited. What Washington can do--worth doing, but still on the margin--is encourage the expansion and replication of quality charters, and that can do some serious good for kids otherwise stuck in bad schools. States, however, are the major determinants of whether

If the Education and HHS departments are serious about the "clearer learning standards" elements of early-childhood education and about alignment of standards between pre-school and K-12, then this could turn out to be a worthy investment of taxpayer dollars. But the early-childhood world has been characterized by a bad habit of gauging program quality by inputs, resources, ratios and credentials and avoiding both explicit learning standards and rigorous evaluations of outcomes. Nowhere has this problem been worse than in the federal government's own largest and costliest early-childhood effort, the iconic Head Start program. Time will tell whether this latest initiative is a serious move to reform the field so that needy youngsters truly do enter kindergarten with the academic "headstart" they need or whether this is just a move to keep a 2008 campaign promise to direct more federal dollars into early childhood programs of the usual sort.