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Is it puzzling that just as the secretary embarks on a “national listening tour” to seek the opinions of educators and parents regarding the impact of NCLB , we hear of yet another five year plan to deal with failing schools? Perhaps the timimg of this may have something to do with an article published in the New Yorker last week – The Instigator: A crusader’s plan to remake failing schools – a profile of Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools. California’s largest non-profit charter school operator Barr is described as a curmudgeon and revolutionary with a take no prisoners attitude when it comes to urban school reform. Green Dot has had some dramatic success in turning around high schools in LA. More to the point, however, according to the article back in March Barr was invited to Washington to meet with Arne Duncan. To his surprise the meeting apparently got quickly to specifics and Duncan revealed his thinking about “committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a “Locke-style” takeover and transformation of the lowest performing one per cent of schools across the country, at least four thousand of them, in the next several years,” (Alain Leroy Locke High School is the school in the Watts neighborhood of LA which Barr has taken over). Duncan was so enthusiastic that Barr returned to LA with a vision for “Green Dot America” and secured a tentative green light for a partnership with AFT president Randi Weingarten.

Few would argue that there are likely a thousand schools among the nearly 100,000 in the United States that are performing so poorly that they could benefit from a significant intervention, but now to satisfy the numerical elegance so often demanded inside the beltway, a “few thousand school idea” discussed with Barr in March has become “1000 a year for five years.”  Duncan’s hallmark in Chicago was his oft-cited pragmatism. While I am not opposed to pragmatism, it should give us some pause that we now have a totally new phenomenon in American education – a deeply flawed law and a secretary of education with a $5 billion dicretionary war chest. The stimulus bill has become the proxy law that guides the administration and consequently every district that benefits from the monies.

Once again here are the broad outlines of the conditions of acceptance for receiving stimulus funds as expressed by Secretary Duncan at Brookings:

We must improve the quality of standards and assessments so that students are leaving our schools ready to succeed in college and prepare to contribute in the workforce. We must build data systems that measure growth, link student achievement to teacher quality, and tell us whether students are on track to graduate ready for college. We must recruit and train the best teachers to be in our nation’s classrooms, particularly where they are needed most in communities, whether it’s intercity urban or rural areas
that all too often have been underserved for decades. And we must turn around the lowest performing schools, the ones that we know aren’t doing the jobs, the ones that we now call “dropout factories.” (emphasis added)

And he went on to speak further on turning around low performing schools:

Sometimes the prospect of turning around schools might seem a little bit daunting, but if we set realistic and doable goals, that job is absolutely possible. Think about this for a minute. We have about 100,000 schools here in America. If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom 1,000 schools per year for the next five years, we could really move the needle, lift the bottom, and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children. As we commit to turning around schools each year, we must also stay the course with them and use what we learn each year to inform the next generation of turnarounds. This is a manageable goal, and we have neither time nor money to waste.

Am I the only one who would like a better idea of where the administration will take the reauthorization? According to a recent post on Michelle McNeill’s blog at EdWeek the administration hopes to have a framework for reauthorization by early fall, next in line after health care. As far as where the “listening tour” will be at any given time there is apparently no advance schedule published.

It is a strange time indeed. A time of dramatic contrasts. Huge and unprecedented amounts of money are promised for public education from Washington and we are grateful for it. At the same time bad things continue to happen and confusion reigns supreme. In spite of the money it appears that there will still be massive numbers of teacher layoffs. state and local officials continue to get seemingly contradictory guidance and advice as to how they can and cannot spend the stimulus money.

As we watch and listen as Secretary Duncan assembles his new team at the Department of Ed there is a sometimes alarming sense of “ad hocism” that leads some to believe that we may not have the new beginning that we had hoped for.

Last week the Associated Press reported that Sec. Duncan offered the following suggestions for how sttes might consider spending their money:

• Sophisticated evaluation systems for teachers and principals.
• Extra pay to reward excellence in teaching or to lure teachers and administrators into struggling schools.
• New charter schools.
• Closing failing schools and reopening them with new staff.
• More technology for classrooms along with training for teachers.
• Modernized science labs and other facilities.

When most local school boards are struggling with how they are going to survive the year without shredding important programs, laying off teachers, reneging on contractual agreements charging parents more for all kinds of things these kinds of utterances must seem at this point in time close to absurd.

The secretary does not seem to speak directly about NCLB very often so we have to continue to interpolate and speculate where they will take us in the future. The first opportunity came with the promise to review the regulations promulgated by the Bush administration on the eve of the election ignoring much opposition to many of the changes. When the results of the review were released a few weeks ago the new Secretary offered little or no change adding fuel to the burgeoning confusion. Last week, Michelle McNeill of EdWeek reported in her blog that the Ed Dept. did have a strategy regarding NCLB.

“The answer”, she said, “spelled out at a meeting I attended yesterday in Washington, is simple: Pure political strategy.

Steven Robinson, a special adviser to Duncan on science, technology, engineering, and math issues and a former adviser to then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, essentially told superintendents gathered yesterday at the American Association of School Administrators’ legislative conference that if the department started to make NCLB more workable, then there would be less motivation in Congress to reauthorize it. (emphasis added)

What exactly does that mean? Congress will reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act just as they have periodically for the 45 years of its existence. My question is when will we begin to see a guiding vision from the administration for the inevitable reauthorization. When will we have the much needed dialog concerning an appropriate role for the federal government in education? When will we confront the distortions that have been the by-product of the standards and accountability movement and brought to new heights under the Bush administration?

Ronald A. Wolk, founder and former editor of Education Week in a recent commentary, “Why We are Still ‘At Risk’ The Legacy of Five Faulty Assumptions” aptly frames the challenge:

Our new president has looked into the abyss of our current economic, energy, environmental, and health-care policies and promises to challenge the fundamental assumptions on which they are based. He admonishes us to join him in thinking and acting boldly.

We can only hope he feels the same way about education policy.

The biggest problem confronting education at this moment is fiscal. The patient needs to be stabilized and when the vital signs are back at safe levels let’s take the time and resources necessary to come up with a new strategy of treatment and support. We can profit from the experience of the last eight years, the question is will we.

So what have we learned in the past 10 days or so about where President Obama and his Secretary of Education would like to take American public education? For one thing we learned that the president is just as prone to overstating the problems as past administrations. You recall in his speech to Congress he lamented the current “crisis” in education and set a few broad goals for the future. NYU historian, Diane Ravitch, referred to these comments as Obama’s “manufactured crisis” , based on an analysis of his comments by FactCheck.org in which they revealed a number of inaccuracies:

* The high school dropout rate hasn’t “tripled in the past 30 years,” as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

* Eighth-grade math scores haven’t “fallen” to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.

* Obama also set a goal “of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” by 2020. But in terms of bachelor’s degrees, we’re nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.

Such gross inaccuracies and distortions in any other policy domain touched upon in his hour long speech would have caused quite a stir had they been discovered, but Americans have been so accustomed to broad brushed criticism of our schools that they simply accept what they hear as gospel. Add into the mix the worst economic circumstances most of us have experienced in our lifetimes and the conditions are even more ripe for hyperbolic scaremongering. I am hoping that President Obama does not fall into that trap. It’s hard to tell at this point.

In many respects, Arne Duncan is as enigmatic as his boss. A group of Education Week editors and writers recently interviewed him at the Department of Education. The entire interview (38 minutes) is available for viewing at this link. It is worth watching.

In the past few weeks, Duncan has been addressing various constituencies with a four pronged message:

•Adopt internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that better prepare students for college and a career. Today, some states intentionally lower standards, essentially lying to kids by telling them they are ready for college when they are not.

•Build high-quality data systems that track a student’s academic career, making it possible to tell which teachers, programs and schools are effective. Better data can foster a shared understanding among educators and parents about what is necessary to improve a child’s education, creating, as President Obama said, “a culture of accountability.”

•Recruit more high-quality educators to underperforming schools as well as to subjects like math and science. If recruiting teachers and principals to the schools and subjects that need them most means offering them extra pay, we should provide it.

•Support effective strategies to turn around underperforming schools. Closing failing schools and replacing staff is tough medicine, but the alternative is unacceptable.

Using the unprecedented monies in the stimulus package as leverage, states will be required to develop detailed metrics in support of these four areas and asked to submit documentation of progress as a condition for receiving the second round of monies.

In a recent op-ed piece, “Educating our way to a better economy“, Duncan laid out the essence of the game plan saying, “To receive subsequent funding from the Recovery Act, states must develop a detailed plan to advance these reforms. States with the most comprehensive and cutting-edge reform plans can also win a share of a $5 billion “Race to the Top” fund – a portion of which will go directly to districts and non-profits that are achieving results.”

We remain relatively clueless as to what specific changes to NCLB will be recommended by the administration.

Poster available here

I came across this poster today which reminded me once again why I began posting to this blog. It is difficult in the midst of this all-consuming financial crisis to remind ourselves that there continue to be larger issues yet to be resolved in the way we educate our children and the ways in which we assess the effectiveness of our teaching. The testing season is upon us once again and it comes at a time when the vast majority of school districts and classrooms are covered by a cloud of uncertainty

I know from personal experience how debilitating the threat of budget slashing and the prospect of layoffs can be .. how difficult it is for individual teachers to maintain their focus when the air is thick with threats and the public discourse focuses on the relative security of public employees. It is particularly tragic to see the layoffs occurring when there is a virtual tsunami of federal cash directed toward schools. Just last week President Obama reminded a “pink-slipped” teacher in a Town Hall Meeting in California that relief was on the way and underscored that the intention was in the short term to prevent layoffs. He mentioned it again last night in his second live press conference. His Secretary of Education reinforces the message everywhere he goes as well.

How does the message get translated here on the street ? The Feds say spend the money fast, but on the local level too often there is a hesitance to spend the money on retaining teachers, but on “stuff”. The reality is that we can survive without the stuff, but not without the teachers. I understand the local rationale, I’ve listened to it for 40 years. These are one-time dollars they will say. Yes they may well be, but this is a once in a lifetime circumstance and if public education is weakened, our ability to recover is also weakened. I guess it is time to look the gift horse in the mouth and say thanks for the money, but do you realize that your earnestness alone is not enough to offset the complexities of school funding formulas and deeply entrenched attitudes.

New guidance from the federal Department of Education with an interpretation that may broaden the ways in which federal stimulus money can be used. Let’s hope that they continue to stress to state and local decisionmakers that retaining teachers is vitally important for both education and the economy.

The first pillar of his plan focuses on early care and education as seen in the dramatic increase in the commitment to Head Start in the Stimulus Bill. He is proposing an “Early Learning Challenge Grant” to raise not only access, but the quality of early childhood programs.

Secondly he spoke of encouraging better standards and assessments to reverse what he described as a “race to the bottom.” He seemed to set the stage for what has become a burgeoning debate over national standards, but fell short of actually calling for them directly. Perhaps the only clue as to how the administration will approach the reauthorization of NCLB came when the president said, “… later this year when we finally make No Child Left Behind live up to its name by ensuring not only that teachers and principals get the funding they need, but that the money is tied to results.”

The third pillar of his plan relates to teachers – “recruiting, preparing and rewarding outstanding teachers.” He said to America’s teachers ” if you do your part we will do ours”:

Here is what that commitment means: It means treating teachers like the professionals they are while also holding them more accountable – in up to 150 more school districts. New teachers will be mentored by experienced ones. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools. Teachers throughout a school will benefit from guidance and support to help them improve.

And just as we have to give our teachers all the support they need to be successful, we need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. That means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children’s teachers and to the schools where they teach.

The fourth pillar he spoke of is promoting innovation and excellence in our schools. And here he calls for the expansion of charter schools – a proposal which will engender tensions since the charter school debate is alive and well. he called for the lifting of caps on charter schools which will please proponents and infuriate opponents.

And finally, he issued a similar challenge to students when he said that none of this will work unless “students take responsibility for their own learning.” While many in the media will see his speech as a direct confrontation with teacher unions, a close reading of his entire speech reveals a far broader based approach to accountability for improving our schools than we have seen for the last eight years. Only time will tell.

You can read the full text of his remarks here.

Last week the Obama administration released its first budget which it clearly regards as transformative. For education there remains a host of unanswered questions mostly related to what happens two years out when the huge increases incorporated in the stimulus package disappear. The education budget contains increases in key areas that would only be transformative when coupled with the stimulus monies. As David Hoff points out on his EdWeek blog, NCLB II, “Title I would rise to $14.5 billion—a 4.3 percent jump. That would leave a steep climb for the program to receive $25 billion in fiscal 2011.”

The US Department of Education budget highlights include the following:

• Creates incentives and supports for States to build comprehensive, coordinated, high-quality early childhood “Zero to Five” systems, building on the early childhood investments in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
• Strengthens and reforms public schools to meet the needs of all students, by helping States to develop high quality, rigorous standards and assessments, vigorously supporting and rewarding effective teaching, and investing in and widely disseminating effective approaches to improving student achievement to help all students make progress toward high standards.
• Expands opportunities for students to go to college and graduate by expanding student aid,
  shifting resources from banks and middlemen toward students, creating new incentives for
  colleges to focus on student completion, and expanding access to low-cost Federal student
  loans.

(emphasis added)

So through the budget proposal we see emphasis on “zero to five” and early childhood education, developing national standards, teacher compensation methods and rewards, replicating programs like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone through a program called “Promising Neighborhoods” and other non-profit alliances with local districts. We still don’t know a lot more about what direction reauthorization of ESEA might take, but if tone is any indication there is a definitely positive change from the new secretary.

He is reaching out to NEA and AFT. NEA president, Dennis Van Roekel, recently posted this video commenting on NEA’s relationship with the new secretary:

The central question remains … can we hold it together at the local level as the fiscal crisis deepens?

We know that he is drawn to “visionaries”. And by shear repetition, we sense that he sees such programs as Teach for America and the New Leadership Academy as scalable entrepreneurial programs that work. He is also enamored of rigorous, internationally benchmarked, and probably national standards. States would do well to take a serious look at how well their standards align with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I mention these things because these much needed dollars are not coming to states and local districts without a quid pro quo – serious quid for vitally need quo seems fair enough, but the devil is always in the details.

As a condition of receiving the education monies states must make certain assurances relating to equitable distribution of quality teachers, development of longitudinal data systems with teacher identifier numbers, improvement of their tests and standards, and assurances that they are in compliance with the requirements of NCLB. States must submit an annual report to the secretary on the progress they have made toward meeting these assurance. What all this means in a practical sense will be determined by a Department of Education which is at least for the short term a department in transition. Secretary Duncan has a vision for the department to transition from a “compliance-driven bureaucracy” to “an engine of innovation, reform and support.” (see recent speech to the American Council on Education)

Meanwhile, on the ground, local districts are struggling to meet the time lines of their budget process. Triage is the order of the day. Teachers and parents are becoming increasingly concerned that decisions will be made prematurely without full knowledge of the implications of the American Recovery and Relief Act for their schools. Time for a deep breath. We are all counting on Arne for the moment.

Investments in Education and Training include:

‐ $53.6 billion for the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, including $39.5 billion to local school districts using existing funding formulas, which can be used for preventing cutbacks, preventing layoffs, school modernization, or other purposes; $5 billion to states as bonus grants for meeting key performance measures in education; and $8.8 billion to states for high priority needs such as public safety and other critical services, which may include education and for modernization, renovation and repairs of public school facilities and institutions of higher education facilities.

‐ $13 billion for Title 1 to help close the achievement gap and enable disadvantaged students to reach their potential.

‐ $12.2 billion for Special Education/IDEA to improve educational outcomes for disabled children. This level of funding will increase the Federal share of special education services to its highest level ever.

‐ $15.6 billion to increase the maximum Pell Grant by $500. This aid will help 7 million students pursue postsecondary education.

‐ $3.95 billion for job training including State formula grants for adult, dislocated worker, and youth programs (including $1.2 billion to create up to one million summer jobs for youth).

…with the President’s leadership, with a bipartisan Congress that’s really committed to education, with support of great, great students and teachers and parents and principals around the country, we have a once in a lifetime historic opportunity to make things better for our children, to stimulate the economy short-term, and long-term to better educate our way to a stronger economy, which is the only way we can do it.

Last night Senator Reid announced that a deal had been struck. The bottom line, $789 billion total package, was less than either the House or the Senate version. The final version has not yet been released, but we do know that the amount dedicated to education was up from the Senate version but far less than the House version. The Wall Street Journal reported the following regarding the stabilization fund going to states:

Of those funds, [ the $789 billion] $40.6 billion would go to local school districts to avoid teacher layoffs or to build or renovate schools. A further $5 billion would be for bonus grants to schools and districts that meet educational performance measures. And $8 billion would be set aside to avoid cuts in “high-priority needs,” such as police, fire and prisons. The overall stabilization fund is considerably higher than the Senate’s $39 billion total but far less than the House’s $95 billion.

It looks like $11.5 billion for IDEA and $10 billion for Title I are still in the package, although nothing is official until the final language is available. What really matters to classrooms around the nation is what happens in the state house. Whether states see the strategic importance of education in the recovery will be tested by how they approach their budget process. Cynics, who incidentally have history on their side, will say that states will do everything possible to use federal dollars to supplant state dollars. The stimulus money is a one time infusion over two budget years. Local school districts are traditionally more sensitive to these short term infusions and the net result may well be that education will be hurt badly as it was in the early eighties. By this time tomorrow we should have a more detailed picture of the education components in the stimulus bill. Many serious questions will remain unanswered.

It seems certain that both President Obama and his new Secretary of Education have a strategic vision for public education’s role in the recovery. The House delivered on that vision, but a funny thing happened on the way to the forum: three Republican Senators took an opportunity to leverage the process that only Wall Street mavens could appreciate and the President’s vision was severely diminished at least for the moment.