More clear, accurate, available and usable information about public education is a good thing - good for parents, teachers, policy makers, and taxpayers — and ultimately for students like me. One good example of a step forward in this area is the Colorado Department of Education (CDE)’s new student growth model, featured in today’s Denver Post:

The model shows how students have grown academically compared with peers in the same grades with similar scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program over the past two years.

“The bottom line is, the model tells us how much growth the child has made and whether that growth is good enough to meet state standards,” said Richard Wenning, associate education commissioner.

Other states have adopted growth models, but Colorado is the nation’s first to use percentiles to describe the growth, Wenning said.

Fortunately, the growth model doesn’t just compare students with their peers. It also uses an objective standard: Continue Reading »

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If you are going to enter a debate with Dr. Jay Greene over what the research on school choice says, you had better at least come in fully armed. Leo Casey, the blogger for the American Federation of Teachers, made the accusation that Greene cherry-picks evidence, but he probably wasn’t prepared for this kind of intellectual smackdown:

If Leo Casey is going to make the charge of cherry picking and improperly citing evidence, he has to deliver proof of those charges. To the contrary, the facts indicate that Casey is the one cherry picking and improperly citing research.

Is there a union for playing fast and loose with the truth? Maybe Leo Casey should join it. Oh, I forgot. He’s already a member of the AFT.

By the time he had delivered this rhetorical punch, Greene had already dismantled Casey’s arguments in effective and short order. When will they ever learn? Never, of course. Admitting that 9 of the 10 high-quality school choice studies show solid evidence of academic gains would be self-defeating. (Then again, another new study has just shown positive results from the Ohio EdChoice voucher program.)

After digging into the question of how well school choice works, you may also want to educate yourself about the historical background of School Choice in the United States.

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Thankfully, most education policy in our country is governed at the local and state level. Though the federal government’s role in education is too big, it’s still very limited. I wish that were really the reason you don’t hear Barack Obama and John McCain say a whole lot about education.

Over at Pajamas Media, Greg Forster has a list of five things the next President - whoever it may be - can do to advance education reform:

• Expand the D.C. voucher program to make it a national model
• Keep testing outcomes transparent
• Fund differential teacher pay
• Improve data transparency for better evaluation of education programs
• Keep pushing teacher unions to comply with financial disclosure reporting

Not many people are going to pick the next President based primarily on education. But it would be best if the media and citizens press the candidates to articulate their positions on these five specific issues. Kids like me can’t vote yet, but we sure appreciate it.

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Okay, I think it’s a long and boring paper, but Ben in the Education Policy Center says the new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality is very important.

What it boils down to is there are a lot of rules, mostly written by well-meaning people, that end up negatively affecting how well kids learn in the classroom. The NCTQ report Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining proves the realization that more damage is often done by lawmakers at the state level than by the private union negotiations at the local level.

The report’s authors say there are three major reasons this “preeminence of state authority” is so poorly misunderstood:

• The old media doesn’t much either understand or pay attention to the issues that govern education–namely, “few have focused on the outsized influence of the teachers union in the statehouse.”
• Neither school district or union officials have a vested interest in bringing public attention to their private bargaining sessions. Short of threats to strike, the media doesn’t get how the issues that are negotiated locally have an impact on education’s bottom line.
• Few scholars have researched the impact of collective bargaining on — or “the origin and history of state involvement in” — public education. Into this vacuum, pro-union and anti-union ideologies devolve into shouting matches.

One good example of research that others could emulate can be found in Dr. Terry Moe’s Collective Bargaining and the Performance of Public Schools. Interestingly, my friends in the Education Policy Center also are among the few that have paid attention to these issues. The Independence Institute has focused on these broader concerns through local Colorado examples, with such reports as Take Public Funds off the Negotiating Table and Nullifying the Probationary Period.

Because more research is badly needed, the general proposal of the NCTQ report is a great idea:

Better data and more transparency can dismantle myths and assumptions about collective bargaining and the role of unions, calling to task ideologically based positions. It is the surest path to achieving more informed negotiations and responsible results out of statehouses and decisions that are geared toward the best interests of school children.

Hey, that includes me! Okay, I guess I like this report, too.

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While comparing education to cars isn’t a perfect fit, there is a lot to be learned from the comparison. As a thought experiment, the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson examines the change in costs and productivity in America’s education system and applies it to the automotive world (H/T Joanne Jacobs):

What would the U.S. automobile industry look like if it were run the same way, and had suffered the same productivity collapse, as public schooling? To the left is a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. According to the New York Times of September 25th, 1970, it originally sold for $3,460. That’s $19,011 in today’s dollars. If cars were like public schools, you would be compelled to buy one of these today, and to pay $43,479 for that privilege (2.3 times the original price).

To measure productivity in education this way assumes that the students being taught today are no more or less challenging than the students being taught in 1970. If they are harder to teach, higher costs would be required to maintain the same output. If they are easier to teach, less would be required. (At least that’s what the Education Policy Center people tell me … I’m not that hard to teach, am I?)

Jay Greene and Marcus Winters tried to answer this question with their innovative Teachability Index. You can debate about the factors they used to measure student “teachability,” but they did a fairly thorough job to reach this conclusion:

The Teachability Index shows that students today are actually somewhat easier to teach than they were thirty years ago. Overall, student disadvantages that pose challenges to learning have declined 8.7% since 1970.

In which case, Andrew Coulson may have underestimated how much we’d be paying for that 1970 Chevy Impala today. Even if the Greene and Winters formula is off somewhat, it’s hard to imagine that students are more than twice as difficult to teach today. Coulson leaves readers with a provocative thought:

So, do you wish the automobile industry were run like public schooling, or do you wish that public education was part of our free enterprise system, with financial assistance to ensure universal access to the marketplace?

I’ll take the latter, thank you very much. Of course, a key part of making the transition work is to help families think more and more like education consumers: Our School Choice for Kids website is one of the best tools for this purpose.

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It’s Friday, it’s hot, and I don’t want to make my Education Policy Center friends work too hard. But before I take a weekend break, here’s a story from the Rocky Mountain News that caught my attention:

Summer slides occur in more than just water.

During summer months, poor children fall behind academically more than wealthy children do.

In fact, two-thirds of the learning gap between rich and poor can be attributed to unequal summer learning activities, research shows.

Education activists call this the “summer slide” for students in Denver Public Schools.

The story goes on to highlight calls for more federal funding of a special summer school program. I’m still young enough to believe this kind of stuff, but do these grown-ups really think a new government program is the best way to address the problem?

What about the idea of year-round school? Or maybe at least summer school programs that aren’t dictated by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.?

Okay, that’s enough. If you’ll excuse me now, I think that water slide idea sounds really good.

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Our governor has placed a lot of attention on the goal of cutting Colorado’s dropout rate in half in 10 years. To get a sense of what it will take to accomplish that goal, inquiring minds should go check out Diplomas Count 2008 by Education Week. (Thanks to John LaPlante at the SPN Blog for pointing it out.)

There’s lots of information at your fingertips, such as:

• State-specific background reports with easy-to-read information … here’s the report for Colorado (almost 26 percent of students failed to graduate in 2005)
• A tool to compare Colorado’s P-20 Council to different states’ education alignment councils
• An interactive mapping tool that allows you to see how successful individual school districts are at seeing kids through to high school graduation

Memo to Education Week: The Education Policy Center staff here says what you have put together is a great resource for looking at the dropout issue. But did you know that there is no way to find Colorado’s largest school district (Jefferson County, where I am right now) on your mapping tool? It doesn’t come up in a name search. It isn’t labeled on a map of the Denver metro area. What’s the deal?

When it comes to great mapping tools on education websites, I’ll stick with the one that helps my parents to find the best school for me.

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Holding back kids who have failed, rather than just pass them on to the next grade and the next teacher, is an education policy that strikes a lot of people as good common sense. But, of course, good common sense does not prevail so often in large public education bureaucracies.

Apparently, in some cases, following the law can be a problem for public education bureaucracies, too. The brilliant Jay Greene writes about Georgia school officials who flouted a law that required students to pass a test in order to move up to the next grade:

In Clayton County 97 percent of students who failed the re-test to get promoted or simply didn’t take the re-test were promoted to the next grade. When asked about why these students were promoted, the District issued a statement that said, “the philosophy of prior administrators was to promote students who failed and provide them remediation.”

Oh. I see. The law says that students unable to pass the state’s test ought to be retained but Clayton County school officials had a different philosophy. Their philosophy was that they don’t have to follow the law.

Jay knows this is more than just a problem of disobeying the law. From his earlier research, he has found that the anti-social promotion reform strategy actually works:

In a study I did with Marcus Winters that was published in Education Financial and Policy, we found that retained students significantly outperformed their comparable peers over the next two years. In another study we published in the Economics of Education Review, we found that schools were not effective at identifying which students should be exempted from this test-based promotion policy and appeared to discriminate in applying these exemptions. That is, white students were more likely to be exempted by school officials in Florida from being retained, but those students suffered academically by being exempted.

So some Georgia school officials are ignoring a state reform that would actually benefit students? I’m still young enough to be shocked by this, I guess.

All this makes you wonder why the state of Colorado or Denver Public Schools doesn’t pursue this type of reform, a key part of the ongoing Bruce Randolph School success story. A lot of adults out there seem to want to “help” kids by promoting them for not having learned what they should. Are you really helping us, though? Self-esteem can’t be manufactured; self-esteem follows success.

Speaking of which, my Colorado Rockies could use a real self-esteem boost, and soon.

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When it comes to school choice and education reform, quite often good politics and good policy are at odds with each other. That’s one thing to draw from reading this post from Tampa Bay education writer Jeffrey Solochek about an initiative on Florida’s ballot this year:

Teachers unions and their traditional allies filed suit against Amendment 9 two weeks ago, but they aren’t the only ones taking issue. A couple of prominent education researchers also see something wrong here.

Jay Greene and Frederick Hess can hardly be accused of being fellow travelers. Greene is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Hess directs education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. But neither are fans of the “65 percent solution.” And neither likes the way Amendment 9 – pushed by Jeb Bush stalwarts on the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission - melds the 65 percent idea with a different policy issue involving vouchers.

What exactly is the problem? Well, thanks to the results of numerous top-notch studies, we know school vouchers “are better supported by top-quality empirical evidence than any other education policy.” But the history of vouchers succeeding at the ballot box has been less than stellar. Fresh on reformers’ minds is last year’s 62-to-38 percent defeat in Utah. Going back even further, an attempted 1992 initiative in Colorado lost by an even wider 2-to-1 margin.

On the other hand, the “65 percent plan” has an initial popular appeal to voters (though Colorado struck it down pretty handily in 2006). So proponents have calculated that tying the two together on the same ballot initiative will help expand school vouchers in Florida. Is it a good political strategy? My friends at the Education Policy Center aren’t sure, but they do know that the “65 percent plan” makes for not-so-good policy (explained by Jay Greene here and by Frederick Hess here).

This year might just give us more proof that successful reform and popular politics don’t always mix.

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Are our schools and officials doing enough to ensure that enough skilled and effective candidates are getting into classrooms to teach kids like me? A recent Wall Street Journal article suggests the answer is still No, but a successful program is showing there’s hope for more change:

Unions keep saying the best people won’t go into teaching unless we pay them what doctors and lawyers and CEOs make. Not only are Teach for America salaries significantly lower than what J.P. Morgan might offer, but these individuals go to some very rough classrooms. What’s going on?

It seems that Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of “education” courses to be certified.

The American Federation of Teachers commonly derides Teach for America as a “band-aid.” One of its arguments is that the program only lasts two years, barely enough time, they say, to get a handle on managing a classroom. However, it turns out that two-thirds of its grads stay in the education field, sometimes as teachers, but also as principals or policy makers.

The article goes on to point out some of the positive outcomes from a new study on the effectiveness of Teach for America. Brooke Dollens Terry, a friend of the Education Policy Center who does similar work in Texas, followed up with a letter to the Journal that hit the nail on the head:

If America wants to increase learning and help its students compete with other countries, states should examine the Teach for America model closely and evaluate if their state certification policies encourage or deter the brightest individuals from entering the classroom.

Colorado is doing well in some areas of teacher quality, but we certainly can do better.

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