I haven’t closely examined the new draft “Common Core” math standards (and am in any case shy about judging them, having myself forgotten the difference between cosines and tangents), but the draft “reading/language arts/literacy” standards are pretty darned impressive. Some of what makes them impressive, however, is buried deep in their infrastructure and won’t necessarily be obvious on first inspection. At least it wasn’t to me. Not until one of the drafters walked me through them did I grasp what they’ve built here.

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. Read the rest of this post >>>

This week’s edition kicks off with a great piece by Terry discussing the unprecedented move by the Ohio Department of Education to close a charter school sponsor (aka authorizer) for fiscal mismanagement. Terry dives into the academic track record of the sponsor’s schools (which is abysmal) and argues that Ohio is right to take action to close them. Nelson Smith from NAPCS says “bravo to Ohio” for this.

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.

As the Washington Post is reporting, the draft K-11 “common core” standards are due to be published any moment. Our own Checker Finn has studied the reading standards and is impressed.

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.

I believe the Department’s decision to set a low bar for RTT finalists sent precisely the wrong message. Instead of pushing states to continue making big changes to their policies and propose bigger, bolder plans in their applications, the Department’s stance lowered states’ sense of what is required to compete.

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

From the Grand Forks Herald:

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

We may live in a digital world, but that doesn’t mean you can have your laptop in class. Everyone knows you’re on Facebook instead of accessing student data systems, or you might be betting on the RTT ponies- well, unless you don’t care, or are just waiting on RTT4HE.  Have we found the new magic bullet?  Maybe, but you’ll have to go down the rabbit hole to find out.

–Marisa Goldstein, Fordham intern

On Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that his department will expand its efforts in civil rights enforcement.  Its civil rights division will monitor racial disparities in enrollment in college prep classes, school discipline, and teacher assignment. Like everything this sounds fantastic in the abstract.  Who after all publicly declares that they oppose protecting civil rights?

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.

“We’re not trying to dummy-down the curriculum.  The whole [educational] system is focused on trying to move kids in a path to get a four-year degree in college, but a number of kids don’t want that.”
— Mississippi State Rep. Cecil Brown, D-Jackson

“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

The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) is seeking to close a troubled charter school sponsor (aka authorizer), the Cleveland-based Ashe Culture Center, Inc.

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

I was just starting to write a post reiterating the problems with Arne Duncan’s “civil rights” announcement yesterday when the phone rang. And it was Russlynn Ali, the Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, calling to soothe my concerns about using civil rights laws to coerce districts to put more minority kids in challenging courses. I like Russlynn a lot, but what she told me made me feel even worse. Here’s how our conversation went, more or less. (I’ll use bold when I’m getting her words exact.)

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

Newsweek’s Thomas and Wingert with a very good write-up of the Rhee-Weingarten saga

Very good i3 analysis from Tom Vander Ark

Encouraging story of a new start charter in a distressed Chicago neighborhood

Great WSJ piece on charters and Harlem

–Andy Smarick

I’ve finally made it through the 377-page final application for the “Investing in Innovation” fund (i3) and several long supporting documents.  The biggest news is that not all that much changed since the draft documents were released last year (if you need to catch up a bit, you can find previous write-ups here and here).

Of course, the program’s major specs are the same: It’s a competitive grant program for districts, nonprofits, and groups of schools (unlike RTT, which is for states), and it is designed to spur new ideas and to scale up highly successful or promising initiatives.

It is still wholly focused only high-need students (so a suburban district with only affluent families may find it very hard to win), and it has the same four priority areas as RTT: teacher and principal quality; better use of data; improved standards and assessments; improving failing schools. Unlike RTT though, bonus points will be awarded to proposals working in one of four targeted areas: early childhood; college access and success; special education and LEP; and rural education.

Grants will still be made in three categories: “Scale Up” grants (up to $50 million) for programs with high degrees of evidence and the potential to grow nationally; “Validation” grants (up to $30 million) for successful programs with less evidence of success and marginally less potential to scale; and “Development” grants (up to $5 million) for high-potential, relatively untested initiatives.

The greatest disappointment is that the Department did not reconsider its earlier decision to disallow private schools from making up a “consortium of schools.”  The upshot is that the nation’s invaluable but deeply threatened faith-based urban schools will be all but excluded from participation.  This decision on the Department’s part was unnecessary and deeply regrettable.

For those interested in getting into the weeds, there were a couple other minor changes:

• Some changes were made to eligibility requirements (related to AYP determinations) to enable low-performing districts to more easily apply
• Development grants will no longer have a pre-application phase
• The definition of “persistently failing schools” was changed to expand (beyond the School Improvement Fund definition) which schools would be eligible for attention
• The 20 percent private sector match was adjusted such that applicants have more time to find partners
• No organization can win more than two grants totaling $55 million

When all is said and done, I expect the nation’s most well known education reform nonprofits to win significant awards.  These include Teach for America, KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, Achievement First, New Teacher Project, NewSchools Venture Fund, and so on.  Also a number of reform-minded urban districts, such as New York City and New Orleans could receive major awards.  The smaller grants will probably go to a wide array of projects that are still largely unknown nationally.

My initial reaction after reading the final documents is that the i3 has significant promise and that the Department did an admirably professional job crafting the application (apart from the private school exclusion). The hundreds of pages dedicated to addressing the public’s comments reflect the huge amount of work done. Though implementation still remains a huge question mark, because state and local politics will play a much smaller role in the i3 than in the RTT, at this point, I suspect the former has a clearer path to success.

–Andy Smarick

I’ve made my way through Secretary Duncan’s civil rights speech (the written version), and there’s much in it to admire.

It’s certainly moving; in vivid language it pays tribute to those who suffered on “Bloody Sunday,” including Congressman John Lewis.

It’s well constructed, weaving together Brown v. Board, the events of 45 years ago, Dr. King’s work, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and efforts to close the achievement gap.

It’s also literate, with allusions to W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Presidents Johnson and Bush (I)

Finally, it brings the data, offering statistics on expulsions, teacher quality, and college attendance.

In terms of new or renewed federal activities, it only provides broad strokes. The Department will conduct compliance reviews relating to college-prep curriculum, advanced courses, STEM classes, and student discipline.  The Department will also expand its technical assistance and outreach so schools know their responsibilities and families know their rights.

The speech didn’t address any of the questions I raised earlier today (related to charters, compliance v. innovation, or racial composition v. student achievement). And there is no sense of how this new effort will work hand-and-hand, if at all, with a reauthorized ESEA.

Overall, it was fitting kick-off speech for a broad civil rights initiative. But it was not a definitive departmental statement on how its view on civil rights will inform or influence a wide array of pressing current policy decisions.

–Andy Smarick

Andy Smarick’s not slacking with a 4-day week; he’s been quoted all over the place in the news lately (see here, here, here and here… and here)! If that’s not enough Fordham for you, listen to Checker’s podcast on federal education spending. And for some non-Fordham news (yawn, I know), try the New York Times Magazine’s ‘Building a Better Teacher’, New Hampshire’s pension lawsuit, Obama’s Ed Tech plan or more from North Carolina’s busing drama. Phew! Now on to the fun stuff. Check out Til Death’s take on merit pay and a new test-prep rap.  Just don’t listen to classical music… and don’t chase the money!

–Daniela Fairchild, Fordham intern

“This is just a gimmick that the governor is throwing out. It’s reform for the sake of reform.”
— Tom Dooher, President, Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers’ union

“Pawlenty Wants to Rewrite Teacher Tenure Rules,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune

84%
Percentage of students on Tax Credit Scholarship in Florida who attend a religious school.

“As Public Schools Face Cuts, State Vouchers for Private Schools May Get Boost,” Orlando Sentinal

The Department just released the final application for the “Investing in Innovation” fund or “I3″.

This is the $650 million sister program to the RTT. I3 grants will go to non-profits, districts, and networks of schools.

Prospective applicants now have 60 days to apply.

–Andy Smarick

The DC charter school market is strong and growing. It has a number of outstanding schools and already comprises nearly 40 percent of the entire public education sector in the nation’s capital. In just a couple years, chartering could become the primary mechanism for delivering public schooling in DC.

But there are a number of low-performing charters in the city as well. The DC Public Charter Schools Board, the city’s only authorizer, moved to close one of those schools late last week. This release lays out the bill of particulars.

It’s never a happy moment when a school closes, but in a number of cases it can be in the best interest of students, communities, chartering, and public education. Should the school close, the critical next step is making sure the students displaced have access to higher performing schools as soon as possible.

As chartering has expanded and its principles have spread to traditional school districts, it has become increasingly clear that tough accountability is just one of many load-bearing walls in the management of a broad schools portfolio. The challenge is figuring out how best to pair closures with new starts and expansions so the universe of schools is both high quality and reflective of students’ needs.

With two different “systems” in DC–the traditional district and the chartering board–coordinating these concomitant activities can be difficult. It’s also one of the great opportunities and challenges of the urban school system of the future.

–Andy Smarick

I’m not as sanguine as Andy about the Department of Education’s forthcoming announcement on civil rights enforcement. I mean, sure, nobody can be against enforcing civil rights. But using civil rights laws to pursue a policy agenda is something else. As I wrote last summer, when word first leaked that the Administration was thinking about combating racial disparities in advanced courses via civil rights lawsuits,

…there are lots of reasons to support efforts that prepare poor and minority students for rigorous courses–and plenty of reasons to complain when students spend their days filling out dittos. But I cringe at the thought of federal officials using the threat of lawsuits to try to fix this problem, if that’s what [Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali] has in mind.

Consider Advanced Placement courses, for instance. Getting more poor and minority kids into them is easy. Preparing students to succeed in those courses is something else. If a school district is forced by an OCR lawsuit to expand access to AP for poor and minority kids, what are the chances that it will do all the complex work it takes (from grades kindergarten through 11) to make sure those students are ready? And what will the impact be on the students who are ready for AP, and whose classes will now be flooded by students who haven’t mastered the prerequisite material? (If you want to know what the nation’s teachers think about issues like this, see our survey of AP teachers here.)

We learned from NCLB that the federal government can make states and districts do things they don’t want to do, but it can’t force them to do those things well.

The Obama Administration seems to have limitless faith in its ability to make the world right from Washington. That’s the sort of hubris that tends to lead to all manner of unintended consequences.

-Mike Petrilli

I believe that persistently failing schools should be closed and replaced by expanded high-performing schools and new schools that have the DNA for success. Some cities are going about this process thoughtfully, slowly rebuilding their portfolio of schools with quality in mind.

Kansas City, it appears, is definitely doing the closure part; whether they do the “thoughtfully” part is a much different story.

The district announced plans to shutter nearly half of its schools. The problem is that the primary motivation is money–the system has an enormous deficit–not student achievement. So we need to wonder if the schools chosen for closure are the lowest performing or the most expensive? Will the closures be done methodically with a constant eye on improving achievement or swiftly to reduce costs post haste?

Closures only work as a school reform tactic if they are part of a much broader, carefully developed, and deliberately implemented strategy. To date, that full strategy doesn’t appear to be in place in KC.

–Andy Smarick

For a while now, Secretary Duncan has been saying that he wants to get the Department out of the business of compliance and into innovation. Many of us have applauded because there’s not a whole lot of evidence that merely following federally assigned input rules necessarily leads to better students learning.

But there is one very clear area where compliance is essential, where it’s a victory when the federal government ensures that specific rules are being followed: civil rights.

Today, the secretary is announcing that the department is ramping up its efforts in this area, with a focus on racial disparities in college-preparatory classes, the differences in how students of different races are disciplined, and the implementation of Title IX’s rules on gender equality in athletic programs.

These laws have been on the books for many years, so the key question is how this administration will execute them differently. The Department thinks the previous administration was lax. A senior official said, “We are back in business.” In the speech, Duncan will say, “The truth is that, in the last decade, the Office for Civil Rights has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities.” That’s a pretty tough charge for sure, and one that an official from the last administration refutes.

Without question, we should applaud any administration for seeking to ensure the fair treatment of all students.

Looking past the commendable primary objective, the timing of this announcement is a bit surprising and puts this administration in the center of two important debates. First, there’s the ongoing war of words about whether charter schools are contributing to racial segregation. One side contends that it is wrong to have schools whose student bodies are overwhelmingly comprised of African-Americans and Latinos; the other argues that the academic results of these schools matter more than their racial compositions.

Second, as noted above, the administration has been saying that the Department ought to be about innovation not compliance. They’ve been seeking to rewire the Department in this way through the Race to the Top, i3, TIF, and other shifts in the 2011 budget. Getting Congress to go along with this fundamental change, however, will be a heavy lift. Members must be convinced that the old model doesn’t work and the new one makes more sense. But today’s announcement underscores that, at least in some areas, the Department has critically important compliance responsibilities.

So in today’s speech, I’ll be looking for how the secretary navigates three issues. First, does he take a position on the issue of racially imbalanced charter schools? Second, does he link civil rights to student performance–that is, will this effort be evaluated based on compliance metrics, achievement metrics, or both? Third, does he explain how this initiative fits with his broader vision of a Department disentangled from the business of compliance?

–Andy Smarick