Welcome to a new era of restraint
Election closed spigot on school bailouts
Opinion | Michael Petrilli

It�s all about the benjamins, baby
A campaign finance battle royale
News Analysis

Another day, another manifesto
Rhee and Fenty go out swinging
News Analysis

The long slog to diversity
What�s a school to do?
News Analysis

Collision Course: Federal Education Policy Meets State and Local Realities
Heads up, ESEA reauthorizers!
Review | Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Education Finance and Policy: Special Issue: Rethinking Teacher Retirement Benefit Systems
The low-down on teacher pensions
Review | Daniela Fairchild

Blurring the Lines: Charter, Public, Private, and Religious Schools Come Together
State cut scores still don’t make the cut
Review | Daniela Fairchild

Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: How Teacher Performance Assessments Can Measure and Improve Teaching
The murkiness of religious charter schools
Review | Remmert Dekker

It�s five o�clock somewhere
One part pensions, two parts affirmative action, and just a dash of election commentary
Education Gadfly Show Podcast | Hosts: Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess

District-charter relationships are love/hate
Can�t we all just get along?
Flypaper's Finest | November 1, 2010 | Terry Ryan

School spending: Ohio�s other obesity problem
Beware the budget saw
Flypaper's Finest | November 2, 2010 | Nick Joch

Walk, run, or gallop to a school near you
And there�s a new podcast in town
Briefly Noted

The few, the proud, the Fordham interns
We�re looking for help this winter and spring
Announcement

Principal power!
Come on over November 10 for a discussion on principal preparation
Announcement

Must-see TV
Our cost-cutting event video is now online
Announcement

Impacting the public
Public Impact is hiring for two posts
Announcement

Opinion and News Analysis

Opinion: Welcome to a new era of restraint
By Michael Petrilli

What do Tuesday’s election results portend for education? After much palaver in many quarters, I conclude that it’s pretty simple: less money, and less reform from Washington. More responsibility shouldered by states and, perhaps, districts. And that equation isn’t as bad as it may sound.

There’s little doubt that a Republican-controlled House will close the federal-spending spigot, including bailout dollars for schools and teachers. It’s true that, if history is any guide, and if President Obama has his way, we’re unlikely to see any cuts to the ongoing federal education investment—which has itself increased considerably in recent years. But the days of $100 billion infusions (as in last year’s stimulus) or even $10 billion infusions (as in this year’s edu-jobs bill) are behind us. Help isn’t coming from the states, either. Most are broke; some face huge deficits and—with as many as two-thirds of governor’s offices and thirty legislatures likely to be in GOP hands—they are utterly unlikely to raise taxes to fend off the impending funding cliff.

The tough-love message to superintendents and school boards nationwide should be clear: The day of reckoning has arrived; let the de-leveraging begin. The spending bubble is over. No more adding staff at a pace that outstrips student enrollment; no more sweetheart deals on pensions or health insurance; no more whining about “large” class sizes of twenty-five. It’s time to live within our means.

But Republicans won’t just work to constrain education spending; they will also attempt to refashion the federal role itself. There are reasons to be worried about this, as kicking it back to change-averse states and school districts brings its own complications. Still, the benefits of closing the book on the No Child Left Behind/ Race to the Top chapter of federal overreach outweigh the risks. Does anyone still believe that Uncle Sam has the capacity or precision to hold 100,000 schools accountable for results? To ensure a “highly qualified” (much less “highly effective”) teacher in every classroom? To right every wrong that dots the education landscape?

You don’t have to be Diane Ravitch to believe that federal education policy has veered off course in recent years. The 1990s energy around holding schools accountable for results—while simultaneously cutting the strings that held them back—has morphed into an enthusiasm for prescription and regulation of the sort that reformers once decried. Race to the Top, for example, wasn’t satisfied with rewarding states that already had a track record of boosting pupil learning. Instead, it lavished money on jurisdictions willing to pledge themselves to a set of reforms that reflected the regnant progressive orthodoxy, circa 2009. These reforms are basically hypotheses—if you do x on teacher quality, you might get y in terms of student learning—but the focus certainly wasn’t on results per se. It was, in fact, on rules, process, promises, and money.

Ironically, the same Administration that widened federal authority in many new directions also gave us a clear roadmap for reining it in: its “blueprint” for ESEA reauthorization. To be sure, plenty of impulses to micromanage the schools are still apparent. But the Obama/Duncan call to scrap federal accountability for the vast majority of American schools would begin to take us back from the edge. Arne Duncan’s “tight-loose” rhetoric (which, let’s admit, hasn’t often been followed by action)—tight on results, loose on means—is exactly the right mantra. (Two years ago, we started calling this “Reform Realism.”) And it’s one that ought to gain support from limited-government Republicans and pro-union Democrats alike. Or so we hope. If, that is, they can agree on anything at all in the months between now and November 2012.

Now that the vast majority of states have signed onto the Common Core standards and related assessments, the feds should empower them to figure out how to reach those standards as they see fit. Provide some dollars (via Title I mostly), cut the strings, and get out of the way.

News Analysis: It�s all about the benjamins, baby

Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform channeled over $3.5 million into the campaigns of reform-minded candidates in Illinois, Colorado, New York, and elsewhere during the run-up to this week’s election—over twelve times what the two groups offered in 2008. While they are still grossly outspent by the unions (three-to-one in Illinois, for example), this non-trivial clump of cash offered shelter to some Democrats facing storms after bucking union bosses. As DFER’s Joe Williams put it, “This year, we wanted to show that we understand the rules and protocols that most other interest groups follow.” Better still, he (and Stand’s Jonah Edelman) seem to be quick studies: Michael Bennet (D-CO), a DFER darling, won by a razor-thin margin, and of eight candidates Stand supported in Illinois, five took control of their seats. If this feels a bit unseemly, get over it. As Edelman said, “it’s about money, money, money.”

“Education groups challenge unions,” by Stephanie Banchero, Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2010.

- BACK TO TOP -

News Analysis: Another day, another manifesto

While a bit hubristic (a common problem these days), Michelle Rhee’s and Adrian Fenty’s Wall Street Journal “manifesto” is worthy of attention. It offers the rationale for the teacher layoffs incurred under their watch—the District was overstaffed, and it was either lay off teachers, or cut critical student programs—as well as a blueprint for other urban districts attempting to reform their public-education structures. While some initiatives executed in D.C. aren’t generalizable, acknowledge the two authors, others, such as closing low-performing schools and streamlining a bloated central office, are. The manifesto is most interesting, however, for its unwitting honesty. Rhee and Fenty admit that their reforms relied on money they didn’t have: “Since the city did not have the money for a significant [teacher salary] raise, we implored several foundations to consider providing the resources to enact a groundbreaking contract.” This confession demonstrates the corner into which we’ve backed ourselves: conditioning education reform on more money from outside. As the money dries up, however, reformers will have to say goodbye to such stratagems and instead shift to something more realistic. Who will lead the charge, and what will their manifesto say?

News Analysis: The long slog to diversity

What’s a school to do? Virginia’s ultra-selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—the best high school in the land, says U.S. News—can’t seem to get its minority population above 4 percent. (That number would have to be more like 33 percent to be demographically-representative of the region from which TJ draws students.) Why? Admissions decisions generally don’t take ethnicity into account, and initiatives to swell the pipeline of qualified black and Hispanic students have flopped. For example, Young Scholars, the only comprehensive program offered to would-be students of TJ, works with over 3,000 targeted youngsters in K-8. Sounds great, but next spring, when the first Young Scholars cohort receives their diplomas, only one will be a TJ grad. This project alone is clearly insufficient to offset the socio-economic, family, and cultural factors that result in such a limited pool of qualified applicants of color. It’s time that Virginia officials cross the river into D.C. and see what charter schools like KIPP are doing to prepare minority students for real academic rigor. They’ll find that it takes a lot of hard work—starting way before high school.

Short Reviews

Review: Collision Course: Federal Education Policy Meets State and Local Realities
By Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The release of this informative and lively book by William & Mary political scientist Paul Manna is exquisitely timed for what many expect to be ESEA reauthorization (finally!) by the 112th Congress, which after Tuesday’s election, may be more open to Manna's counsel than its predecessor. In its pages, he draws from eight years of study on NCLB implementation and does a first-rate job of depicting its consequences—both positive and negative—and drawing insightful conclusions for the future federal role in K-12 education. He ends with scant faith that the traditional ESEA approach—brought to what may well have been its apogee in NCLB—can yield good results. “Crafting a new role that better recognizes the constraints limiting federal power in education” might, however, “enable federal policy to make valuable contributions.” “With such an acknowledgment,” he writes, “the vast majority of influence over the nation's schools would still reside in state and local governments. No doubt, that would prove frustrating to reformers who wish to see Washington play a more aggressive role....Still, if educational results...are most important, then it should not matter if federal leaders or their colleagues at other levels of government wield the most power. The point would be to engineer federal advocacy, funding, incentives, and information to help state and local governments improve opportunities and results for the nation's students.” Sage advice, that.

Review: Education Finance and Policy: Special Issue: Rethinking Teacher Retirement Benefit Systems
By Daniela Fairchild

This 450-page special edition of Education Policy and Finance offers a one-stop shop for the teacher-pension novice and journeyman alike, furnishing timely and comprehensible overviews of our teacher-pension predicament as well as thoughtful empirical analyses of today’s muddled pension reality. No stone in this debate is left unturned. Rick Hess and Juliette Squire illustrate the political dynamics perpetuating the “irresponsible fiscal stewardship” of teacher pension plans and offer political strategies to make such plans more tractable. For those interested in the legal frameworks behind pensions, Amy Monahan outlines the regulations that affect states’ ability to reform. And for those curious about the cost of defined-benefit programs on mobile teachers, Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky offer a sobering analysis. (Splitting a thirty-year teaching career across two states adds up to a net loss of over half of one’s cumulative pension wealth.) As fixing teacher pensions becomes an increasingly prominent piece of the education reform puzzle, studying this volume might just serve you well.

Review: Blurring the Lines: Charter, Public, Private, and Religious Schools Come Together
By Remmert Dekker

With the rise of religiously-affiliated charter schools higher and yon, the line separating secular and sectarian education is increasingly murky. Are these schools a beachhead for valuable cultural, linguistic, and ethnic learning? Or are they a backdoor entry into state-sponsored religion? This thoughtful book explores this complex terrain and emerges with a rather cloudy answer: “The combination of dramatic public policy initiatives proclaiming charter schools as the answer to genuine school reform, relaxed public attitudes to the separation issue, and apparent judicial confusion regarding the wall of separation have left us with standards which are barely discernable.” To prove their point, the authors offer case studies of a Catholic charter school that rents space from the local archdiocese, a Hebrew charter school that offers a “modern Jewish education,” and another with an Islamic dress code. Stepping away from sectarian schools, the authors also question ethnically-based charter schools. Is a charter school that teaches Arabic culture, including the Qu’ran, too religious? What about one that uses the Bible as a key text? Debates over religious instruction in public schools have raged pretty much since Horace Mann; this book further stokes that fiery conversation.

From The Web

The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: It’s five o’clock somewhere

Mike and Rick are manifestoed out, and instead talk shop on election implications, campaign contributions, and color-blind admissions. Amber jazzes up the pension reform debate, and Chris asks which witch is which.

Flypaper's Finest: District-charter relationships are love/hate
By Terry Ryan

A love/hate relationship sums up what’s happening across the country when it comes to district-charter collaboration. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to spread the love by providing support and encouraging cooperation among district and charter leaders in places like New York City, New Orleans, Denver, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. Specifically, Gates is pushing the development of district-charter “collaboration compacts” in various cities, which would theoretically lead to real commitments to work together….

Flypaper's Finest: School spending: Ohio’s other obesity problem
By Nick Joch

With a financial squeeze (“strangle hold” might actually be more accurate) on the horizon for Ohio, voters are eager to hear how soon-to-be elected officials will handle the state’s mammoth budget hole. Not surprisingly, many fear the budget saw (see photo below for a special Fordham interpretation of “budget saw”) will fall on K-12 education as it represents 40 percent of the state’s budget. As Terry mentioned in last week’s Gadfly article, education spending in Ohio has been increasing at an alarming rate over the past two decades, even as enrollment numbers have declined….

Extras

Briefly Noted: Walk, run, or gallop to a school near you

• Fordham’s hometowns of D.C. and Dayton both made NACSA’s 2010 list of the top ten school districts served by charters. In D.C., 38 percent of students attend charters; in Dayton, 29 percent.
• Arne Duncan heads across the pond this week. Among his stops is a meeting with British Education Secretary Michael Gove. Gove recently launched his “free schools” initiative, modeled after the charter movement in the U.S. Charter-style schooling may not be new to Blighty, but Gove’s agenda is still pretty ambitious.
• Competition! American RadioWorks now has its own education reform podcast. Expect it on Fridays.
• The Supreme Court is set to determine the constitutionality of tax credits for religious schools. And the line just keeps getting blurrier…
• Boston shows itself less equine-friendly than Philadelphia.

Announcement: The few, the proud, the Fordham interns

If you’re an engaged and savvy individual with a hunger for education reform, you’ve come to the right place. Fordham is now accepting winter/spring intern applications for our Washington, D.C. office. Read up on their duties and apply here.

Announcement: Principal power!

Principal preparation has a new face starting November 10. On that day, from 10:00 to 11:30 AM, join Fordham, the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, and the Center for American Progress for the release of the Rainwater Leadership Alliance’s new report: “A New Approach to Principal Preparation.” Learn more about the event or RSVP here.

Announcement: Must-see TV

Did you miss our recent event “Cost-Cutting Strategies for Schools and Districts”? Turn that frown upside down. The event video is now available on our website. Watch it here.

Announcement: Impacting the public

Public Impact is on the hunt for two knowledgeable consultants to lead projects on turnarounds, human capital, charter schools, and finance. If this sounds like just your fit, apply today—the application deadline is Monday. Learn more here.

Fordham's featured publications:

Now What? Imperative and Options for "Common Core" Implementation

This Fordham Institute publication--co-authored by President Chester E. Finn Jr. and VP Michael J. Petrilli--pushes folks to think about what comes next in the journey to common education standards and tests.

Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010

This national survey of education school professors finds that, even as the U.S. grows more practical and demanding when it comes to K-12 education, most of the professoriate simply isn't there.

America's best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents

This study tackles a key question: Which of thirty major U.S. cities have cultivated a healthy environment for school reform to flourish (and which have not)?