Next, read Checker’s review of Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System. The Dayton Daily News covers the Finn-Ravitch buzz and asks “So we have, from right to left, Finn, Obama, and Ravitch? Or is it left to right?”

Be sure to check out Mike Lafferty’s report on Ohio’s STEM meeting for excellent on-the-ground perspectives from parents, teachers, and business folks as to why STEM is important (and fears about how to fit it into the curriculum). Also read Mike and Tim’s analysis of how much money Ohio could save through district “consolidations” (as in, sharing services, not consolidation ala Brookings’ recent recommendations), and Emmy’s piece that points out if Ohio is not a round 1 RttT finalist, we’ve lost a month of valuable time to make real changes to our round 2 application in order to be more competitive.

Finally, if you’re curious to know what will.i.am and Pell (as in, Pell grant) have in common, or what Drew Carey is up to these days, the answers are in Editor’s Extras.

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2. The latest Ohio Education Gadfly is here!
3. Don’t miss the Ohio Education Gadfly

Besides doing justice to the “skill side” of English/language arts (from early reading on up through sophisticated writing), they’ve taken language “conventions” and content seriously–and cumulatively–in a dozen ways. They’ve devised deft ways of incorporating literature (including means by which monitors of state/district curricula can gauge the quality and rigor of what students are actually asked to read). They’ve delicately balanced between “traditional” and “modern” approaches, between “basic” and “21^st Century” skills, etc. They’ve imaginatively incorporated the reading sides of science and history as well as English per se. They’ve supplied plenty of compelling examples of what kids at various levels should be reading. And they haven’t overpromised. Indeed, they state plainly at the very start that proper implementation of these standards hinges on also having a topnotch curriculum in place.

During the three-week comment period that starts today, Fordham’s experts and many others will pore over these (and the math standards). Grumps will inevitably be sounded from many directions. Nobody can say what will then happen. But my own initial reading is that millions of American kids would be far better off in schools adhering to these standards than they are today–and if their schools are serious, their curriculum strong, their teachers competent, and the still-to-come assessment systems are well-designed and properly aligned, those young people will emerge from 12th grade in possession of a plausible version of college readiness, at least in the fields addressed here.

Keep in mind that math and E/LA are the only subjects addressed (save for smidgens of history and science) and that the amount of construction needing to be placed atop the standards foundation is immense. States and districts will need to be ready, for example, to transform their curricula (and very likely to institute statewide curricula); to renovate their approaches to instruction (and very likely strengthen their instructional personnel); and to buy into new assessment systems that haven’t even been designed yet (though four very interesting models were aired at a Washington conference this week). Taking these standards seriously will lead in time to fundamental changes in just about everything in K-12 education. That’s a very tall order indeed and not something to be done until people are satisfied that these standards deserve it.

Some states may well determine that their current standards are superior (though we should be wary of those who say that when what they really mean is they don’t have the energy or will or resources to make the requisite changes). The last time Fordham reviewed state standards—a process we’re now commencing once more—we found just six jurisdictions with math standards that deserved “honors” grades and only twenty that earned A’s or B’s in English. All the rest got C’s or below. It’s hard for me not to think that their schools and students would be better off with the “Common Core”—and all that follows from it. That’s probably also true of some states that already have decent standards in place but aren’t implementing the kinds of instructional programs and assessment systems that turn standards from aspirational statements into real drivers of learning. (California, that includes you.)

Forget for the moment the complexities introduced by Secretary Duncan’s plan to pay for the first round of assessment development and by President Obama’s premature and heavy-handed hint that future federal (Title I) funding will hinge on states participating in this arrangement. Forget, too, the plain fact that we still have no idea how this arrangement will be organized, governed or financed over the long haul. For the moment, just look at the draft “college and career ready” standards themselves and ask whether these set forth (for two subjects anyway) a first rate depiction of the skills that you’d be proud to see young Americans acquire in school.

I think they do. But let me caution you again: when you review the Common Core drafts, don’t just eyeball them. Like a building, appearances can be deceiving—and in any case you want to know that there’s more here than a façade. Dig deep and, if the architecture and infrastructure aren’t clear to you, demand a tutorial. You, too, may be favorably impressed.

–Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Related posts:

1. More on the Common Core draft standards…
2. House Ed & Labor Republicans comment on the common core draft…
3. Fordham comments on the Common Core State Standards

Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute praised the examples of suggested texts from ancient Greece (Homer) to modern times (Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri). “It’s full of terrific stuff, high quality, content-rich, the kind of thing you want your kids or grandkids to read in school,” he said.

Related posts:

1. Getting into the common standards weeds
2. Checker Finn talks with John Merrow
3. Common standards a laudable goal, but watch for perils

From the Lincoln Star Journal:

The commissioner (Roger Breed) said he doesn’t know how the fact that Nebraska doesn’t authorize charter schools played into the state’s chances. At least one finalist doesn’t authorize charter schools. “So apparently it isn’t a pass/fail on that basis,” he said.

Nebraska might have been convinced to seriously consider charter legislation had the bar been higher. Instead, Kentucky, a charter-free state, made it to the finals, sending a clear and unfortunate signal to the rest of the nation.

I now expect none of the nation’s 10 charter-free states to pass a charter law in the next six months. I’m sad to say the expansive RTT finalist list seriously attenuated the program’s leverage.

UPDATE: More evidence from Alabama

Alabama Education Association spokesman David Stout, however, was not buying arguments that the state’s lack of a charter school law cost it the $181 million it hoped to get from the fund. “It’s obvious that you don’t have to have charter schools to be funded,” Stout said.

–Andy Smarick

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North Dakota school superintendent Wayne Sanstead says applying for “Race to the Top” money would have cost more than $250,000 just to prepare the paperwork. Sanstead says the program also favors states with charter schools and other education practices that North Dakota doesn’t follow. Sanstead says a second grant round opens up this summer, and he and other North Dakota education officials will discuss whether it’s worth it to take part.

This helps explains why the i3 has a special preference for rural projects.

–Andy Smarick

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2. 3 more RTT predictions
3. The dog that didn’t bark

–Marisa Goldstein, Fordham intern

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The details, though, paint a more troublesome picture.  First, the shamelessness of it is astonishing.  This is the same Department of Education that can’t support a voucher program in Washington DC to help minority children escape the grinding incompetence of the DC school system.  Now it wants to spend its resources determining whether schools in Fairfax County or Westchester have a disproportionate number of white kids in college prep classes.  Someone’s priorities seem misplaced.  Even Nixon would blush.

Second, it’s hard to see how Duncan can do this without running headlong into the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1.  Duncan plans on relying on “disparate impact” analysis to show for instance that school districts with a disproportionate number of white students in advanced placement classes are guilty of discrimination.  The cure for that disparate impact will be “robust remedies” like early  intervention programs.  But if (white) parents discover that their children have been denied access to an AP class to ensure racial balancing, they will likely bring suit just like the parents from Seattle in Parents Involved. And chances are, they will win. After all, Justice Kennedy, in his controlling opinion, singled out identifying students based solely on race as unconstitutional.

Third, anyone familiar with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s (HEW) enforcement of the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in the 1970s knows that we’ve been down this road before and it’s not a smooth ride.  In the notorious Adams v. Richardson litigation HEW became compelled to pursue in the same fashion Duncan has outlined to take on enrollment disparities in school districts across the country.  Political scientist Stephen Halpern in On the Limits of the Law documents the “perverse and insidiously negative” consequences of pursuing these goals through the courts.  As another scholar Jeremy Rabkin noted in Judicial Compulsions, the interests of the students quickly got lost in a “fog of legalisms” to be replaced by the interests of advocacy groups allegedly acting on their behalf.  Both authors emphasized the unintended consequences caused by judicial enforcement.  In the case of Duncan’s announcement, the goal displacement rituals are practically limitless.  At the very least, one can easily envision school districts putting unprepared students in AP classes simply to satisfy the Department of Education.

Fourth, as I show in Complex Justice, when experts and elites from afar try to determine what minority parents and children want and need they often have no idea what they are talking about.  In Missouri v. Jenkins, when the court and its self-appointed experts tried to improve the quality of education for African American children in Kansas City they structured their reforms around what they thought middle-class white children would want.  As a result, after spending more than $2 billion, educational outcomes declined and African American parents became outraged and actually led the effort to end the court’s attempt to help them.  Focusing on college prep classes when many minority children are trapped in dysfunctional and failing urban school system will likely be met with a giant “huh?” from many parents.

-Joshua Dunn

Dunn is co-editor of Fordham’s From Schoolhouse to Courthouse volume, co-author of Education Next’s “legal beat” column, and associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

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2. Secretary Duncan’s civil rights speech
3. President Bush, the hall monitor for the civil rights lobby

“Bill Seeks Career-Track Courses for Miss. Students,” The Associated Press

$13.7 million
The amount that New York could save if they approve a proposal to reduce the number of Regents exams currently offered.

“State mulls cutting number of Regents exams,” Buffalo News

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This blazes new territory for the nation’s charter school program. While there have been many charter school closures over the years, there are no instances where a state has actually stepped in to close a sponsor. In fact, Ohio, Minnesota, and Missouri are the only states that give the state department of education the authority to revoke a charter school sponsor’s right to authorize schools. (In most other states, authorizers are brought into being via statute, and they can only be decommissioned by the legislature. Ohio’s General Assembly, for example, fired the State Board of Education as a charter school sponsor in 2003.)

According to press accounts the department wants to close Ashe for “not properly overseeing the spending of taxpayer money.” Specifically, Ashe has sponsored two schools that the state auditor has deemed “unauditable.” According to an investigation by the state auditor, the sponsor’s chief executive officer took payments from a school where his wife – a member of the school’s governing board – approved said payments to the sponsor. Considering the sponsor is supposed to represent the interests of the state – including ensuring tax dollars are actually spent on the educational needs of children – this seems an obvious conflict of interest.

Ashe’s sponsored schools also have a woeful academic track record. Over two-thirds (67 percent) of Ashe-sponsored schools are rated in the state’s worst category, Academic Emergency (“F”), compared to 36 percent of charters in Ohio’s “Big Eight” cities. Students in Ashe-sponsored schools make fewer academic gains according to the state’s value-added metric, and worse, as the chart below illustrates, Ashe-sponsored schools have not improved over time.

The state is sure to face criticism from many in the charter school community for seeking to revoke the sponsorship authority of the Ashe Culture Center. But, based on publicly available academic and fiscal data, it appears to any fair-minded observer that Ashe deserves to lose its right to sponsor schools. ODE should be supported in its efforts to take on charter sponsors as a way to ensure a basic standard of quality for Ohio’s charter schools.

-Terry Ryan

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1. Did You Know? Findings from Fordham’s latest charter school accountability report
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Me: So I don’t mind the civil rights rhetoric, but I’m worried about the unintended consequences. School districts are going to see this announcement and freak out, take shortcuts, and just push minority kids into Advanced Placement whether they are ready for them or not. That won’t be good for the minority kids, and it won’t be good for the other kids.

Russlynn: I agree, this can’t just be about filling out forms. It has to be about culture change. No one’s ever tried to put robust remedies in place. We have to monitor the districts, enforce the agreement, use all the tools at the disposal of the Office of Civil Rights. We have to get in there and look at feeder patterns, early interventions…

Me: Well, I wish you good luck, but I’m skeptical. But even if you do all of that in a handful of places, what about the 15,000 other districts? How do you keep them from doing it the wrong way?

Russlynn: That’s why we’re going to put out detailed guidance and provide technical assistance about students’ rights and districts’ responsibilities…

Holy Toledo! The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is going to use “all the tools” at its disposal to fix one of education’s most intractable problems: the achievement gap. Because that’s what’s driving the “disparity” in AP course-taking between white and Asian students on the one hand, and black and Latino students on the other. (Sure, there still might be some schools that are steering minorities away from challenging courses in a discriminatory manner, but I suspect that’s a very small part of what’s happening now.) Take the District of Columbia. Even though there are ten times as many African-American students as white students in DC public schools, more white students (80) passed an AP test last year than black students (60). (Here’s the data.) Does that make Michelle Rhee and her team racist?

Of course not. Rhee and company are working hard on boosting these numbers for poor and minority kids, but it’s going to be a decade-long struggle, as it starts by getting kids better prepared in pre-K, hitting all the right notes in elementary school, making sure they get access to tough courses and great teachers in middle schools, and on and on. If Ali and Arne think they are going to discover the right “remedy” to make all of this happen in a recalcitrant district–and get implemented well–they are either high on power or high on something else.

Or maybe they just haven’t read Shep Melnick’s sobering chapter in the recent Fordham-Brookings volume, From Schoolhouse to Courthouse. In it, the Boston College scholar offers a careful history of federal remedies in education, and shows that (in my words) you can force states and districts to do things they don’t want to do, but you can’t force them to do those things well. These efforts almost never have a happy ending.

It’s hard to fault Ali’s zeal; her whole career has been dedicated to giving poor and minority kids a shot at a better education. .But zealotry alone isn’t going to fix our schools, and could make them even worse.

-Mike Petrilli

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2. Federal overreach on steroids
3. Russlynn Ali: Too hot?