• Yesterday, Colorado’s U.S. Congressman Jared Polis put his name to some Ed News Colorado commentary celebrating School Choice Week, aptly concluding “Empowering all families with school choice should be honored every week in word and deed, not just this week”
• Daily Caller columnist Caroline May reports on the legendary and beloved comedian Bill Cosby’s passionate pleas for more school choice and great classroom teachers, as well as his clear statement to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan that more K-12 system funding is not the answer to our nation’s education shortcomings
• Last but not least, my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow helped to celebrate School Choice Week with a couple radio show appearances, including a discussion of choice and reform with the Mike Rosen Show’s large audience and a Northern Colorado conversation on the Amy Oliver Show

Time to run, but what else can I say? SWISH!!!… Nothing but net!

To commemorate the occasion, Colorado’s own State Board of Education chairman Bob Schaffer penned his thoughts on the National Journal Education Experts blog. At the time NCLB was debated and passed Congress, Schaffer was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. So his perspective on what he describes as “an enormously bad idea” is especially insightful:

Ten years later, there are few who deny NCLB has been a failure. Anyone who expected otherwise back in 2001 was either fooling himself, or more likely, didn’t read the law.

The law actually accomplished just what it was written to do – spend enormous sums of money the federal government didn’t have and hadn’t yet printed, provide perverse incentives for lower standards, and turn school administrators and teachers into dutiful federal bureaucrats instead of the productive local educators they had previously been free to be.

Ouch. Schaffer explains elsewhere in his piece how the original idea under the name “No Child Left Behind” promoted by President Bush was a good concept that morphed into a bad program through the Congressional amendment process. He also argues that the marginally positive benefits that have followed NCLB were “well underway through state initiative” and likely would have come to fruition without the joint efforts of Bush and the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

Like I said before, I haven’t been alive long enough to know just how true that is, though his argument certainly has merit. Back in the day, my Education Policy Center friends tried to make the most of the federal legislation here on the ground in Colorado. In 2003 Pam Benigno wrote the influential, groundbreaking and frequently-cited issue paper No Child Left Behind Mandates School Choice: Colorado’s First Year. In the end, sadly, the nearly toothless and incomplete federal legislation failed to fulfill the promise, notwithstanding the best efforts of many.

For a slightly different point of view, you also should check out Kathleen Porter-Magee’s somewhat softer assessment that the law primarily fell short because of weak implementation that failed to upgrade from the NCLB 1.0 scheme. I sort of get her comparison of NCLB to the iPod, since my dad sometimes lets me play with his.

Congress may some day get around to reauthorizing the major education legislation — whether tweaking it or starting over from scratch, I don’t know. But here’s hoping that lawmakers take heed to the lessons of why NCLB failed to fulfill the lofty expectations.

Being of a decidedly reform-minded bent, the group has offered up some expected developments in their five choices for each of the “Best” and “Worst” categories. Most of the items I’ve covered at one time or another during 2011. Naturally I can’t make you vote for any particular events (or even vote at all), but I am making some strong suggestions that fans could select on my behalf as one of the most inexpensive Christmas gifts you’ve ever purchased. This is my blog, and I like to save the best for last. So which of the five choices should you recognize as the worst education event of 2011?

Worst: As time goes on, I have less and less patience for the big people in Washington, D.C., so the bungled re-authorization of No Child Left Behind (#2) mostly makes me shrug. The magical money tree hasn’t done much for real education reform in many of the Race to the Top-winning states (#3), either. Maybe California’s new governor further messing things up (#4) just seems too far away for me to get too worked up. And as tempting a choice as it is, the chief reasons for the repeal of Ohio’s Senate Bill 5 (#5) are little connected to education reform and teachers unions.

So by default, I am casting my vote for #1: the Atlanta cheating scandal. As I wrote months ago when the story first emerged, the problem here is the predictable overreaction from reform opponents. If the scandal led to better testing security and/or greater use of online adaptive assessments, I would have to vote for something else as the worst development of the year. But the Koret Task Force page explains what really has transpired:

…[W]hat the public has “learned” is that testing is bad because it creates so much stress that well-meaning educators are pushed to the limit and eventually succumb (for the children’s sake, of course!) to the temptation to cheat, lie, and break the law.

Best: My Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow wrote an op-ed explaining the sensible rationale for rolling back government employee collective bargaining privileges in states like Wisconsin (#2). expressed my admiration for the sweeping range or reforms legislated in Indiana (#5). While California made some progress in establishing working rules for its “Parent Trigger” (#3), here in Colorado the idea faltered. And my edu-crush on Michelle Rhee is no secret, so I had to give some consideration to her teacher evaluation system surviving her tenure in DC Public Schools (#4).

But in the end, we can’t do any better than recognizing 2011 as the Year of School Choice (#1). Especially when the “reinvigoration of school choice via opportunity scholarships and vouchers” hit so close to home with the passage of the groundbreaking Douglas County Choice Scholarship Program. Forget the injunction for now. Cast your vote for the accelerating national trend toward educational freedom.

Vote for the #1s, and I’ll say: Thank you very much! Of course, I could point out that there are still nearly four weeks left in 2011, and maybe we haven’t yet experienced the “best” or “worst” education event of the year. But that’s just the pesky little provocateur in me speaking….

It’s not this precocious little 5-year-old who’s dumping broccoli on the birthday cake. It’s Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine, from a couple of Washington think tanks, who a couple weeks ago released the report Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers. Sounds pretty innocent, doesn’t it? Just wait. They released the report at an event called “Are Public School Teachers Overpaid?”

Now look. I could only begin to start explaining the research methods and the finer points of the debate. As a provocative way to bring attention to the topic of K-12 employee compensation, asking “Are Public School Teachers Overpaid?” is an effective way to bring attention to your work. And it definitely brought attention. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan responded directly in a Huffington Post column. Duncan comes across as unnecessarily snippy and personal — declaring that the study “insults teachers and demeans the profession.” (See my parents’ point about breaking up parties?)

Really? That sounds a little too dramatic. But the Secretary also makes a valid point that the provocative question isn’t the best way to frame the issue. Meanwhile, his own attempt to reframe the issue — saying that the authors “exaggerated the value of teacher compensation by comparing the retirement benefits of the small minority of teachers who stay in the classroom for 30 years, rather than comparing the pension benefits for the typical teacher to their peers in other professions” — was a bit hyperbolic. It is interesting to note that many of those on Duncan’s side prefer to focus on salary and ignore some of the key benefits.

Anyway, all this to say you really ought to read the follow-up by Rick Hess on his Education Week blog. Like my friends in the Education Policy Center, Hess believes some teachers are underpaid, and others indeed are overpaid. The problem is the system is out of whack and rewards far too many things that don’t matter:

As school systems wrestle with tough fiscal decisions, it’s vital to understand that one-size-fits-all pay is insensitive to questions of productivity. Although the term “productivity” is typically regarded as a four-letter word in K-12 conversations, teacher productivity means nothing more than how much good a given teacher can do. If one teacher is regarded by colleagues as a far more valued mentor than another, or helps students master skills much more rapidly than another, it’s axiomatic that one teacher is more productive than the other. Yet, step-and-lane pay makes no allowance for such differences.

Yikes, “productivity” is a four-letter word when talking about K-12? Just looking at a few of my more recent writings that use the word (see here, here and here) probably would mean it’s about time to wash out my mouth with soap. Which probably would rule out going to any parties to see if asking the provocative question about teacher pay really is as bad an idea as some people say it is. Then again, mom and dad aren’t “edu-crats.”

So let’s keep fixing how teachers and other professional educators are paid. Anyone who needs some ideas might want to start by reading Pioneering Teacher Compensation Reform: K-12 Educator Pay Innovation in Colorado.

“Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” airing tonight and tomorrow. “I feel very, very badly for the children there.”

“You have seen massive increases in class size,” Duncan said of the Texas public school system during Perry’s terms as governor since December 2000. “You’ve seen cutbacks in funding. It doesn’t serve the children well. It doesn’t serve the state well. It doesn’t serve the state’s economy well. And ultimately it hurts the country.”

Eduwonk and Time Magazine education columnist (and Democrat) Andrew Rotherham was as puzzled as anyone by the Secretary’s broadside, and got a chance to follow up directly:

When I asked [Arne] Duncan about this dire assessment in an interview I had scheduled today for my next School of Thought column, the former head of the Chicago school system was light on specifics:

“Texas has challenges. The record speaks for itself. Lots of other states have challenges too. But there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done in Texas and a lot of children who need a chance to get a great education.”

To which edublogging guru Joanne Jacobs aptly replied:

The statement is meaningless: All states have challenges that require hard work. The question is whether Texas is shirking.

Both Rotherham and Jacobs point out that Texas hasn’t been shirking. A stellar performer? No, but certainly nowhere near the bottom. The Lone Star State’s graduation rate significantly outperforms the Windy City, where Duncan once ran the schools, and even Texas’ minority students edge out their Chicago counterparts. (To be fair, Rotherham has his own issues with Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s education platform and posits that “it’s debatable how much credit Perry deserves for education reforms that largely predate his administration.” But I’m not writing here to wade into these deep political waters.)

Further, the Secretary’s claim that Texas has witnessed “massive increases in class size” does not comport with reality — as analyzed both by PolitiFact and the Dallas Morning News. The line of criticism itself is strange enough given that only six weeks ago Duncan told a national news reporter that reform should focus more on teacher quality than class size.

But what do I know? I’m just a kid, and a lot of this political debate flies way over my head. Someone tells me the big election is 442 days away. If it only gets more absurd the closer we get to November 6, 2012, just how crazy is all this talk going to get?

Even though it stars yucky girls, it won seventh place in some big national competition. Guess I should be happy for all of them — so sue me, all right?

But anyway, this is an education blog, and I did have a reason for bringing up D.C. and politicians. (Only so often, you know, don’t want to make it more than I can take.) Allison Sherry of our own Denver Post has an interesting write-up for Education Next on the education policies and platforms of leading Republican presidential contenders. While you should read through the whole thing, I picked out one section to highlight:

A candidate like [former Massachusetts governor Mitt] Romney or [former Minnesota governor Tim] Pawlenty is still going to have to explain to the Republican base why they’re not going to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. During the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party Senate and House candidates across the country promised on the campaign trail that they would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and hand control over to state governments. Many of them are now members of Congress.

Shrinking the size and the budget of the U.S. Department of Education seems a cause we all can rally around, given the realities pointed out at the beginning of the post. Closing it down altogether in the near future seems a bridge too far, though on the Republican side it’s open for debate. Those candidates looking for a less stringent approach might consider the ideas set forth in a new American Enterprise Institute Outlook by Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric, titled “Federal Compliance Works against Education Policy Goals”. Recommendations for federal education policymakers include:

1. Closely examine all existing compliance requirements, whether statutory, regulatory, or OMB requirements, to ensure they are consistent with federal policy objectives and worth spending the time to enforce at the federal level and comply with at the state and local level.
2. Eliminate federal compliance requirements that do not directly relate to achieving federal educational policy goals.
3. Ensure federal requirements are aligned and not duplicative across programs.…

Yeah, these recommendations aren’t the most exciting stuff to run on as a candidate. So I’m not a political campaign manager. But they do seem like the sort of basic actions that could attract a great deal of support — simple, basic things to do to start undoing the growth of the federal behemoth… For the kids. (Remember that video at the beginning?)

So apparently there’s some big national march called “Save Our Schools” or something like that. I told you about it a month ago. While the good people at the National Council on Teacher Quality took a conciliatory approach to pointing out the flaws in the “SOS” program. But the award goes to Sara Mead, writing at Eduwonk, for this effective takedown:

…This is not an agenda for accomplishing anything. It’s just a wish list. Half of it is a wishlist of things the organizers don’t want (performance-based pay, school closures). Half of it is a wishlist for things someone might want, without any clear theory of how to operationalize them or what that might actually look like in practice in the real world. (I, too, would like to see “Well-rounded education that develops every student’s intellectual, creative, and physical potential”–but in the absence of clear prescriptions and mechanisms about how to make that a reality, well, you might as well wish for a pony, too.)…

I can’t help but think that a lot of people marching on the nation’s capital for this cause — as pure as their motives may be — are tangling with some vague, outsized imaginary enemy. Then again, as Anthony Krisky has pointed out, it’s not exactly a grassroots movement. Given the pro-union sympathies of so many of its outspoken leaders, one might have to ask them what they think about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s reforms enabling local school districts to save teacher jobs? Is that “anti-teacher”?

Guess what, Colorado has its own “SOS,” too. I wholeheartedly defend their right to speak up. I just don’t get much of where they’re coming from with a largely illogical, fanciful and ambiguous agenda. Maybe we should just start referring to it as SOS?… as in: Huh?

The big, hard-to-ignore education news of the week comes from Atlanta, Georgia, in the sunny South. The Christian Science Monitor’s Patrick Jonsson reports:

Award-winning gains by Atlanta students were based on widespread cheating by 178 named teachers and principals, said Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal on Tuesday. His office released a report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that names 178 teachers and principals – 82 of whom confessed – in what’s likely the biggest cheating scandal in US history.

This appears to be the largest of dozens of major cheating scandals, unearthed across the country. The allegations point an ongoing problem for US education, which has developed an ever-increasing dependence on standardized tests.

Let me tell you: If I got caught cheating, I couldn’t even imagine the consequences my parents would bring down on me. No trips to the beach all summer? No dessert for a month? Grounded from playing with Legos AND video games? (Oh, it’s too hard to even think about…) Have my blogging privileges revoked? Some of you would like that, I’m sure. But just imagine the devastation for a little kid like me.

Anyway, a cheating scandal of Atlanta’s magnitude, combined with other smaller instances around the country, sets off the alarm bells. For some, it means responses like this one from a certain well-known figure with an agenda of undermining test-based accountability for schools:

Maybe if I were clever enough I could have responded on Twitter:

Response to Atlanta scandal totally predictable. High-stakes cheating incentivizes overreactions from test-based accountability foes.

When certain students conspire to steal test scores from a teacher, or traffic in plagiarism, do we end the practice of graded tests and reports? When some of the old black-and-white TV quiz shows were caught rigging outcomes, did we ban Jeopardy! and The Price is Right from giving out prize money? What happened in Atlanta is serious and cannot be treated lightly, but we must not forget that the perpetrating educators made decisions to cheat. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind didn’t make them do it.

One expert quoted in the Christian Science Monitor story made a salient point:

“I think the broadest issue in the [Atlanta scandal] raises is why many school districts and states continue to have high-stakes testing without rigorous auditing or security procedures,” says Brian Jacob, director of the Center on Local, State and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan.

Time to take a deep breath and handle the situations — both the cheating scandal in Atlanta and the lack of reasonable test security and auditing procedures in various districts and states — with some grown-up responsibility. Hence, I hand it over to Peter Meyer writing at the Flypaper blog:

We need to know that our teachers are teaching and that children are learning. We need tests. And we need accountability. The next move in Atlanta is crucial to restoring credibility to a discredited school system. But what will that move be?

You also need to read Matthew Tabor’s initial reaction, complete with extra intriguing details and some witty retorts.

No fewer than 13 states have enacted school choice legislation in 2011, and 28 states have legislation pending. Last month alone, Louisiana enhanced its state income tax break for private school tuition; Ohio tripled the number of students eligible for school vouchers; and North Carolina passed a law letting parents of students with special needs claim a tax credit for expenses related to private school tuition and other educational services.

The Douglas County Choice Scholarship program gets a mention later on in the piece, making Colorado one of the 13 states. Isn’t that number ironic, coming right after the July 4th holiday, remembering the number of colonies that declared independence from the British crown? It could have been 14, if Pennsylvania hadn’t fumbled the ball, as the Journal points out. So make that Year of School Choice almost perfect.

The other quip I wanted to share comes from the NEA Representative Assembly. Joanne Jacobs notes that delegates approved a resolution supporting the use of value-added test scores to evaluate teacher performance — well, in theory, that is. As Education Week blogger Stephen Sawchuk ably reports, “the union’s leaders underscored that no existing standardized tests currently meet the criteria for inclusion spelled out in the policy.”

Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency delivers the punchline:

You can add this to the list of things that NEA supports, but doesn’t really believe exist – like good charter schools, Republicans who support public education, and workers who freely choose not to join a union. [link added]

Couple both pieces of news with the NEA’s deep internal conflict over an early endorsement to re-elect President Obama, and Greg Forster makes the case that the union is ready to flee in terror. Stay tuned….

One thing about fireworks is how they can provide a moment of brilliant light that illuminates the sky and sometimes the ground below, providing a candid glimpse of things otherwise concealed by a blanket of darkness. In that sense this frank declaration of union priorities delivered at the 2009 National Education Association Representative Assembly certainly would qualify as fireworks:

Will there be similar fireworks — or maybe fireworks of another kind — at this year’s NEA event, which is now getting underway in Chicago? The big attention for 2011 is focused on NEA’s new teacher evaluation policy proposal, but the agenda also includes a proposed dues hike and a formal endorsement of President Obama for re-election.

The best coverage of the NEA Representative Assembly (hands-down) can be found at two blogs: Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts and Stephen Sawchuk’s Education Week Teacher Beat. Light a sparkler or two for me while you’re at it.