Kevin Welner

Perhaps our senators haven’t yet noticed, but their constituents don’t much care for No Child Left Behind.

Perhaps they haven’t noticed all the protests against excessive testing and school closings. Or that all of the Democratic candidates to replace NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg seem to be running away from his education policies. Or the defeat of Tony Bennett in Indiana, or the two recent school board elections in Los Angeles, or last week’s Texas legislation that cuts back on testing.

Perhaps they aren’t listening to the parents, teachers, students, and lots of other folks – certainly including insignificant researchers like me – who think US education policy has fallen out of balance. In just one day, a new Education Declaration garnered more than 10,000 signatures.

It’s not just the excessive testing, but that’s part of it. It’s not just the compulsive use of high-stakes incentives and punishments, but that’s part

Here’s an experiment. Put a thermometer in your refrigerator. Note the temperature a few hours later. It’ll probably read something like 37 degrees. Now put a different thermometer in there and repeat the process. Again, it’ll probably read something like 37 degrees. Feel free to do this until you exhaust the supply of thermometers in your home, or perhaps head to the store and buy a few more. What have you learned?

You’ve certainly zeroed in on the temperature of your refrigerator. You may also have learned that if you are using the refrigerator during the time measured, the measured temperature increases (hotter air enters). You may also find that if you add resources (turn the dial to make it colder) the temperature drops. But, assuming you find this information valuable, how many measurements do you really need?

In truth, there is indeed a value to measuring, including testing of students. But there are also diminishing returns and there are costs. In the case of the refrigerator, it’s not just the cost of the multiple thermomete

Once we understand the interconnectedness between schools and communities and the indisputable causes of academic results, we will quickly end the reckless and unfounded school turnaround and closure policies of the last decade. We will understand that the best path for addressing the educational crisis in disadvantaged communities is through collaboration among parents, teachers and administrators, combined with financial investment.

At one level, I applaud Sec. Duncan and others who have focused attention on what is now known as “school turnaround.” Just as when former President George W. Bush called our attention to the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations,’ we need a sense of urgency about the unjust fate of so many of our children.

But as we saw with Bush’s NCLB, recognizing a problem is a very different thing than sensibly addressing that problem. And in truth these two problems—school-turnaround and ‘soft bigotry’—are really one and the same. Children learn when they have opportunities to learn, and denying t

I’ve been checking this space all week, interested in what my colleagues would write. Nothing. But I think that silence itself is an important response. While school safety is an educational issue, the Newtown killings are not—at least not in any direct sense.

Schools can and should take steps to address issues such as bullying. The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence has described effective programs, and we at the NEPC have described the research in this area and set forth specific recommendations, particularly focused on safe schools for lgbt students. This is where school policy should indeed be front and center.

But the unimaginable horror of Newtown was not about schools. The innocent children of Sandy Hook Elementary School last week or at Columbine High School over a decade ago could just as easily been innocent theater-goers in Aurora, innocent parishioners at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, innocent college students at Vir

School boards are indeed one of the messy components of democracy. Like mayors, legislators and governors (and presidents), it’s easy to come up with cogent criticisms and many instances of failure. Yet we fool ourselves if we look at only one side of the ledger, pretending or suggesting that problems will somehow disappear if we just shifted governance responsibility to some other mechanism or entity.

Currently around the nation we see increased mayoral control (e.g., NYC, Boston and Chicago), increased private market control (e.g., New Orleans), and increased control from governors or their appointees (e.g., Michigan and Detroit) – but we don’t see any actual benefits of these different approaches.

Before advocating such a switch away from school board control, we should have at least four goals in mind:
1. Responsiveness to all stakeholder voices.
2. Responsiveness to local contexts and needs.
3. Professional knowledge and competence

What are the big education topics that will surface for the next four years? In truth, we can expect more of the same. Little has changed. We have the same President, the same Secretary of Education, the same basic Congress, and the same national power dynamics shaping the larger discourse. So we’ll likely continue to see a great reliance on test-based accountability systems and on various policies rooted in school choice mechanisms.

For more than a decade, politics have pointed toward one direction and evidence has pointed toward another. Policy has heeded the politics and shunned the evidence. We can hope this will change, but we shouldn’t expect it.

Yet we should also acknowledge that President Obama has stressed how important evidence is to him. So what would a research-based shift in policy look like? At the most basic level, it would involve a multi-level understanding of accountability. Yes, schools and teachers and students should be accountable. But so should those with greater power and authority.

A third-grade teacher doesn’t h

The below post from Jeanne Allen includes some confusing contentions. In particular, I don’t understand how she is using her numbers to contend that the expanded population of test takers does NOT help explain the decline in reading and writing scores.

Page 13 of main report from the College Board presents an easy-to-read section entitled, “The Increasing Diversity of SAT Takers.” The main information presented – in can’t-miss, bold type – is as follows:

754,922 minority students in the class of 2012 took the SAT, up from 600,830 in 2008.

457,971 class of 2012 SAT takers spoke a first language that was not exclusively English, up from 347,512 in 2008.

Unlike the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which randomly samples students throughout the U.S., the SAT is taken by a self-selected group. As the nation becomes more successful in encouraging under-represented subgroups to con

Since it’s campaign season, I figured it might be fun to respond to this question using an extended metaphor, with teacher evaluation policy playing the role of Gov. Romney’s Irish Setter, Seamus, and policy makers (including Pres. Obama’s EdSec Arne Duncan) playing the role of Gov. Romney.

In reading on, please remember that I’m trapped here in a “swing state,” subjected to a barrage of distorted photos of candidates overlaid with announcers’ voices portending our collective doom should we vote for the other guy. So bear with me for a bit; hopefully this will resonate even with the non-brain-addled in the non-swing states.

The Seamus story is well-known, at least to regular readers of Gail Collins’ column in the New York Times. The Romneys went on a family vacation, which included a 12-hour drive to Canada (Lake Huron). Seamus, the family dog, was put in his crate and strapped to the roof of the station wagon. The trip was carefully planned, down to specified rest stops. But Seamus fouled up the plans a bit

While Stand for Children is well positioned to work with the wings of the Republican and Democratic parties that agree with Stand’s agenda, how well do these “frienemies” ideas work for those on the outside looking in?

For example, while Stand for Children is an astroturf/grasstops group aligned with powerful and wealthy interests and can therefore find allies among both Republicans and Democrats, true grassroots community organizations generally advocate policies that put them on the outside looking in.

While Stand for Children attempts to bring parents in line with a pre-existing reform agenda, true grassroots community organizations try to understand local needs and to help those in the community amplify their own political voices. This often plays out as local voices objecting to the imposition of policies from the outside that do not fit local needs of desires.

It also plays out in calls for economic justice. Political voice is much stronger among the wealthy than among the poor. Educational opportunities are also much greater for t

Merriam-Webster defines “waiver” as “the act of intentionally relinquishing or abandoning a known right, claim, or privilege.” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/waiver)

The dictionary also offers a definition of “coerce:” (1) to restrain or dominate by force … (2) to compel to an act or choice … (3) to achieve by force or threat. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coerce)

With those definitions in mind, here’s how Joy Resmovits in the Huffington Post explained the U.S. Department of Education’s NCLB waiver process, which the Department refers to as NCLB “Flexibility:” “In exchange for the waivers, states had to agree to a plan that included parts of the Obama education agenda, which includes ‘college- and career-ready’ standards and grading teachers, using, in part, students’ standardized test scores.” (

The lawsuit brought by the ACLU in Michigan is indeed important, but not so much because its claims are framed around the idea of reading as a civil right. Various courts in prior adequacy cases have framed their opinions and their orders in terms of the state’s responsibility to provide opportunities for reading and other basic learning. In New York, for instance, the constitutionally-required “sound basic education” was declared by the court in 1995 to consist of “the basic literacy, calculating, and verbal skills necessary to enable children to eventually function productively as civic participants capable of voting and serving on a jury.”

Other courts have gone beyond basic literacy in defining the state’s constitutional obligation to educate its children. For example, New Jersey’s Abbott v. Burke accepted the academic standards in all seven core curriculum areas (visual and performing arts, comprehensive health and physical education, language-arts literacy, math, science, social studies, and world language) as the s

The summer slide is real, it’s important, and it’s been neglected. But as we think about how to address it, we need to move away from a mindset focused on the mere intensification or extension of the school year. That’s a remedial model, and it’s one that’s often built on a deficit idea of children and their families.

In contrast, think about the enrichment activities gifted by wealthier families to their children over the summer. These activities engage and they accelerate learning; rarely are they intended as a simple extension of the school year. These children are given rich opportunities to learn, and when summer turns to fall their minds are prepared to continue playing with new ideas.

From this perspective, we need to move away from the old “summer school” thinking, which generally connotes a corrective experience and which continues to target kids seen as failing (or close to failing). In most such situations, the students know very well that summer school is a punitive intervention, which is partly why it’s

The lower enrollment of special needs students in charter schools is a fact that’s been known for well over a decade. And, as the GAO report documents, the disparities are particularly stark in categories such as “intellectual disabilities” and “developmental delay.” This is a problem for at least four reasons: (a) the likely denial of unique opportunities to students with special needs, (b) the increased concentration of these students in non-charters, (c) funding non-comparability, and (d) results non-comparability. Further, what’s particularly troubling about the news of the GAO report was the quoted responses of charter advocates, downplaying the differences as “small” and suggesting that the cause may be over-labeling in non-charters (see http://on.wsj.com/LApPyP).

This excuse-making (whatever happened to “no excuse schools”?) is as unproductive as it is objectionable. Let me briefly walk through the four problems listed above.

1. The

Keeping students away from graduation ceremonies and Disneyland days are not particularly troubling to me. But keeping students away from educational opportunities certainly is. And that’s what zero-tolerance policies do.

Suspensions and expulsions should be used sparingly, when students seriously assault one another or bring dangerous weapons or drugs to school. Normal adolescent misbehavior should be addressed with constructive approaches like restorative justice and PBIS (positive behavior intervention and supports). Simply put, discipline policy should be aligned with academic goals. Support and intervention – not punishment – should be the normal response to simple misbehavior.

Last fall, the National Education Policy Center published a comprehensive review of the research in this area, documenting how removing students from classrooms for minor disciplinary issues harms overall achievement goals and does not improve education for the remaining students. An accompanying brief offers statutory code changes to improve data collection and adva

In my comment below, I wrote that Mr. Romney is staring at a menu of choices "written by the Catos and Friedmans of the world." In fact, the Cato website has a short piece stating their disagreement with the Romney voucherization approach: www.cato-at-liberty.org/gov-romney-federal-incentives-mean-federal-power/

While Cato is firmly in the 'get the government out of education' camp, their preferred approach is neovouchers -- tax credit policies used to divert public money to private schools. These policies differ from conventional vouchers in that the actual dollars never make their way into public coffers.

Those of us who are approaching (or well into) middle age remember the old days of Republican demands for a limited federal role in education and Democratic promotion of civil rights protections and compensatory programs. One could make a good case that this balanced world started to wobble on its axis during the Clinton years or even during the elder Bush or Reagan years. But it was NCLB that really stood the world on its head. In an illustration of bipartisanship at its worst, both parties relinquished their commendable core values and produced a transformation of American education that, more than a decade later, continues to befuddle students and educators.

In the new political world, the Republican approach is not to reduce the federal role in education – it’s to reduce the public role in education.

Meanwhile, the Democratic approach – or at least the Obama administration’s approach – is to adopt a slightly less extreme version of the Republican platform. In key areas, there’s not a lot of daylight between Obama’s ed

Allow me to suggest a clear path toward institutionalizing an honored place for the arts in our public schools – a survival plan for arts-rich education.

1. Drop all that fluff about enrichment and well-rounded citizens in a democracy. I’m pretty sure most lawmakers equate that with Marxism.

2. Create a commission co-chaired by a former anti-trust lawyer and a former Secretary of State, who will then alert the nation to the dire national security consequences of the “Arts Gap” with China.

3. Create a second commission, chaired by a former CEO of a computer company, who will then warn the nation of the dire economic consequences of our Arts Gap with Korea and Singapore.

4. Add arts to STEM (STEAM?)

5. Convince the testing companies that there’s a market for standardized assessments of the arts.

6. Seed and build that market

I keep thinking of the old adage: You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it. Yes, measurement of education’s outcomes has its place; we can learn about students and schooling through tests. But what parents really want for their children are learning opportunities that are engaging, challenging, and supported. Few parents send their children to school hoping for day after day of exam-prep. Although NCLB included some elements that deserve praise, its downfall and its apparent legacy is an array of test-focused practices that are undermining the enriched learning opportunities our students deserve and need.

NCLB functions on the premise that what gets measured gets done – and educators have complied. Schools have squeezed out non-tested subjects (e.g., social studies, arts and music, and even science). NCLB has provided a clear disincentive to teach these other subjects.

Schools have similarly narrowed the teaching of knowledge and skills within the tested subjects. Working backwards from a given state’s test format and past test questions,

The comparability rules are an overall benefit. They’re also of relatively minor importance and are a distraction from the giant issue of funding disparities between districts.

Accordingly, I’m glad that the Department did this analysis. I only wish that it had included an explanation of how the problem of intra-district resource disparities is dwarfed by the issue of inter-district disparities. Rutgers professor Bruce Baker has looked at this issue in two articles (http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/5 and http://bit.ly/rHQ4rK), and he and I together looked in particular at the continuing inter-district problem (http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/718/831).

Baker’s quick thoughts (titled “The Comparability Distraction”) on the new Department of Education study are very much worth a read (http://bit.ly/uQ4KKK)

Yes, let’s strengthen Title

For talented, committed educators who want their students to be engaged, challenged and supported, the choice seems to come down to this: Is it better to have their professional commitments and their students’ educations undermined by bad policies made by states or by bad policies dictated by Washington? If that framing seems a bit melodramatic or depressing, please read this recent article from the Kappan (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/01/kappan_burris.html)

As a starting point, Diane’s assertion is correct and wise: “The federal role in K-12 education should return to what Congress envisioned in 1965: providing additional resources for the neediest children; supporting basic and applied research; providing useful information about the condition and progress of American education; and protecting the civil rights of students.”

But the larger education discussion, in state capitals as much as in DC, remains imbalanced. Legislators at all

In my earlier (below) entry I mentioned "the counter-productive mandates around teacher evaluation." This probably could use some fleshing out. The basic structure of the system in the bill we saw last week specified guidelines for teacher evaluations, based in significant part on student tests scores. Those evaluations would then be used as part of a separate system designed to more equitably distribute well-evaluated teachers. The last part of this is a goal that's very much worth pursuing. But, if the underlying measures drive poor practices (as do high-stakes test-driven reforms) and if the underlying measures have serious issues of reliability and validity (as these do), then the equity-focused elements are unlikely to be successful.

If policymakers hope to address inequities between districts and schools -- and I very much support such efforts -- the places to focus are working conditions and resources. Principals in high-needs schools will find applications increasing substantially when their schools become more desireable places to work. Sadly, this era

As of Monday, the Harken-Enzi bill has the support of Sen. Alexander, and the counter-productive mandates around teacher evaluation have been limited to districts that receive Teacher Incentive Fund money (as reported in Ed Week).

I find myself very much agreeing with Chad Wick that any actual bipartisanship in this Congress is to be rejoiced. But the substance, even with today's improvement, is still more of the same. It's still centralized outcome demands grounded in student testing and test scores. The drafters haven't learned the two key lessons from the NCLB experience: (1) students don't learn because Washington makes a demand; they learn by being in engaging, challenging, well-resources classrooms; and (2) those Washington demands are met through a process of goal displacement, with narrowed curriculum and teaching to the test being the surest way to increase test scores.

Because these lessons have been ignored, the ESEA reauthorization process is tinkering

Given congressional intransigence, it's reasonable for Obama to trumpet as a success a program that actually originated in DC and resulted in change. The coercion underlying Race to the Top absolutely did work. States like Colorado (which did not receive the r2t money) responded by adopting the prescribed policies, as did winning states like New York. Charter school caps were lifted and teacher evaluation systems linked to student test scores were adopted, as were the common core standards.

The only thing missing from a truly successful policy is an ounce of high-quality research evidence supporting the conclusion that these policies will actually help improve learning.

Whether or not r2t is anti-conservative is beside the point (the Republican presidential candidates are apparently obliged to attack all of Obama's policies); it's anti-evidence-based-policymaking.

The administration calls this plan “ESEA Flexibility.” When a prisoner is moved from one cramped, contorted position into a different cramped, contorted position, “flexibility” does not seem to me like a good description of the situation.

More specifically, the administration is right in two ways and wrong in two ways. First, what they got right:

1. NCLB was up for reauthorization in 2007. For over four years, Congress has failed to act. Frustration with congressional inaction is justified, and unilateral action is also justified.

2. The ratcheting up of AYP proficiency thresholds and accompanying sanctions had gotten to the ridiculous stage, as anyone paying attention in 2001 could have predicted. The administration is right in offering waivers from those sanctions.

But the two things the administration got wrong have undermined these positives.

1. While probably legal, it harms the democracy to have the administration unilate

The NSBA initiative sounds fantastic. This is something that we at the National Education Policy Center have identified as an urgent need and have been focusing on more and more in recent years (see http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/safe-at-school).

In response to the last specific question above, quantifiable measures could include the obvious – the reporting and analysis of bullying incidents of different types. But it could also include such things as the presence of anti-bullying and anti-harassment policies, the development of clear and effective policies to cover cyber-bullying, and the level of participation in Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs).

Thinking in particular about the NSBA initiative, one thing the students can speak about is what percentage of teachers at their schools are people who they truly feel would help them in they were bullied. Another element to focus on, at the high school level in particular, is the culture in athletic programs, which tends to be extremely important in terms of overall school culture. Both of these issues (teach

Yes, “student achievement” should be a significant part of teacher evaluation.

But is “student achievement” synonymous with “a score on a single test given in the early spring”? Might other tests be important? How about papers, projects, reports, engaged conversations, etc? Are these assumed to correlate so highly with those standardized test scores that we don’t have to worry about them? And if for some reason we believe this, should we believe it will still be the case after we ramp up the stakes and Campbell’s Law kicks into a high gear?

We all know the answers to these questions, and they don’t bode well for continuing on the present course. The problem, though, is that while it is relatively easy to administer yearly standardized tests and then calculate value-added growth scores, it’s very difficult to attach a number to these other important aspects of learning and student achievement. So in lieu of throwing up our hands and taking student achievement out of the evaluation calculus, policy makers

Below, David Sciarra offers a set of seven specific reform proposals ("Time for Charter School Reform"). I very much favor proposals like David's, which I think would strengthen the charter sector and schooling overall -- but I'm generally considered a charter skeptic. Most contributors here, on the other hand, appear to strong supporters of pro-charter policies. I'd love to see direct responses to his proposals from that perspective. Do you see David's proposals as I do -- as reforms likely to further the mission of charters and of public schooling -- or as a negative? Do you favor some but not others? Why?

I keep wondering what Mr. Duncan’s like at the family dinner table.

“Dad, please pass the catsup.”

“I’ll consider it son, but your sister also wants the catsup. And I think I’ll only give it to one of you. How about each of you stand on your head? Whoever can maintain it longer gets the catsup.”

If the waivers are good policy and it’s within Duncan’s authority, he should be giving them out like Halloween candy. It’s harmful to withhold a useful opportunity or resource from a state just because the state refuses to completely tow the EdSec’s party line. This fixation he has with “competition” (coercion, extortion, shakedown … you say potato, I say potahto…) is very troubling.

As Messrs Quon and Domenech note, there doesn’t have to be a dichotomous relationship between preparation for college and career. But let’s not fool ourselves. As the post below from Joanne Jacobs illustrates, this thinking about the importance of career preparation can quickly devolve into advocacy of tracking. The U.S. has a long and clear history of tracking and discrimination tied to class and race, and this danger should be in the forefront of our thinking as we approach policy alternatives.

The idea of “college and career readiness” should mean that our public schools aren’t foreclosing one option or the other. It doesn’t – we should stress – mean that we expect all our students to end up going to college (or skipping college in favor of an immediate career).

The basic idea of high-quality multiple pathways approaches – now going by the name “Linked Learning” – is the integration for all students of academic