Jay Mathews does a quick video??interview with superb NYC schools chief Joel Klein for the Post. ??"Systems don't change because you charm them."

--Andy Smarick

In a famous 1974 fight in Zaire, an aging Muhammad Ali retreated to the ropes early, covered up, and allowed the undefeated champion George Foreman to slug away, round after round. Foreman, and just about everyone watching, thought the bigger, stronger, younger man had it won.

But Ali was luring him in, just getting his opponent into position. In the 8^th round, Ali knocked him out, and the legend of the rope-a-dope was born.

I took a serious bruising reading the first three-quarters of Secretary Duncan's December 10th speech to the National Conference of State Legislators. I figured there'd be things in the talk I didn't like given the audience.??As Mike wrote about this summer the links between NCSL and teachers unions are well known and meaningful. I suspected that the secretary would tell them some things they wanted to hear. These prospects didn't bother me too much; nothing egregiously wrong about knowing and playing to your audience, as long as it doesn't go too far.

But this went very far. After the obligatory flattering (legislators do the tough work and governors get all the credit) and a nod to the difficult economic times facing the legislators, the secretary's words about policy were marginally disquieting. First there was a reference to ???innovative, autonomous schools,??? code for the faux charters that many state legislators prefer to truly independent public schools (and which found their way into the RTT application).??Then there was the line about not liking charter schools, only liking good charter schools???a fine sentiment but easily turned into ammunition for caps and more regulation by charter antagonists.

Then there was the praise for the several states that had passed laws recently getting tough on charters. All of this, but not a single word about the states that had lifted charter caps.

The reform community's legs got wobbly when the secretary ended this flurry with a quote from AFT president Randi Weingarten???that state laws not only need to do what is right for kids but also be fair to adults. That argument, of course, can and has been used to defend a whole host of troubling policies: strict pay scales, rubber rooms, data firewalls, and so on.

Just when I was about to throw in the reform towel, the secretary rallied. And then some. He had saved his energy for some tough talk on teachers. And, I suspect, with his previous honeyed words still clinging to the crowd's ears, he had a receptive audience.

He began by talking about the hundreds of pages of state code on pay, tenure, and evaluations, and yet the deafening silence on teacher quality. ???We have a law for every aspect of the teacher's career???except one to recognize success.???

He then cleverly flipped the traditional defense of today's system???that current rules treat educators as professionals.??He said that instead we would treat teaching as a ???revered, distinguished profession??? if we measured teacher quality based on student learning and if we used that data to evaluate teacher preparation programs. Again playing on the theme of professionalism, he later said, ???Teachers would have to demonstrate their ability to be successful in the classroom, not merely show minimal competence and subject knowledge to get a license, just as other professionals are now required to do.???

He said in an ???exemplary system,??? ???tenure decisions would consider in significant measure whether teachers improved student performance.??? Consistently weak teachers would be ???counseled to another profession.???

This argument culminated in his asking the legislators to consider their own policies and to be ???honest when we see a law that protects an adult interest but does not advance those of our students.??? Such policies include restrictive licensing rules, single-salary schedules, weak evaluation and tenure systems, the inequitable distribution of high-quality teachers, and rules that turn ???the process of removing a chronically ineffective teacher into something resembling a lengthy legal trial.???

Very strong, much-needed statements from the secretary. I'm uneasy that he sacrificed charters along the way, but maybe that's the price for getting state legislators to lean forward in their chairs and take note.

Ultimately, the winner of this fight will be determined by what these legislators do when they get back to their state capitals. Do they answer the bell, come out swinging, and craft new, reform-oriented laws in order to compete for the Race to the Top? Or do they declare ???No mas ??? and retreat to their corners and the comforts of existing, establishment-friendly policies?

This was no knock-out, but the secretary had a couple very, very good rounds.

-Andy Smarick

Photograph from Library of Congress

I've written several times now about Secretary Duncan's tumultuous relationship with federalism. My argument has been that he begins by saying that states and districts can get education right and that the feds should stop meddling, but then in instance after instance (RTT application, SIG documents, national standards, failing schools, Hawaii's furloughs, charter caps, etc) he contradicts himself by aggrandizing the federal role.

I have sympathy though because figuring out the right role for the federal government in education policy is no easy task. But I've been pointed and nagging because the Department needs to come up with a coherent position if it's to sell an NCLB reauthorization plan.

The secretary jumped into these waters again during his San Diego speech. I can't say it was a complete success, but important progress has been made.

First off, the underlying tension remains, and unfortunately it is as stark as ever. At one point, he explained that it is not the role of the federal government to ???direct or micromanage??? the work of states and districts. He recounted times during his tenure in Chicago when he had to battle the U.S. Department of Education when it went too far. But only paragraphs away he???the federal government's education leader???said, ???And today I am calling on state lawmakers to rethink and rewrite the hundreds of pages of state code.???

Obviously, these two views are acutely at odds. But later in the speech, he begins to adumbrate a vision of the federal government's role that may eventually resolve some of this dissonance and possibly even emerge as bedrock principles.

He said the feds has two roles. The first is helping under-served students (low-income, ELL, students with disabilities). Historically speaking, this is a completely sound interpretation given programs like Title I and laws like IDEA. Interestingly, however, he later takes an expansive view of what this means saying, ???Because the federal government has a special role in serving disadvantaged students, I am not going to stand by silently and perpetuate the status quo in chronically failing schools where low-income students fall further behind every year. The days when any of us???the federal government, states, and districts???can wink and nod at educational malfeasance are over.???

This is equivalent to the dominant interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause. Just as the federal government can regulate interstate commerce and just about anything that intersects with it, Secretary Duncan is saying that the federal government's interest in helping disadvantaged kids authorizes extensive federal activity.

If this is what he means, this is a fascinating approach and the best explication yet of his view. Of course, it will inevitably lead Secretary Duncan to do things that Chicago schools CEO Duncan found intrusive, but now we have a framework that can be discussed.

The second role, he said, is the fed's evaluation and identification of what works and the encouragement and promotion of innovation and progress. Historically, this is a much more problematic interpretation, for the U.S. Department of Education (with small exceptions) hasn't done much of this. In fact, he even noted in the speech, ???the department has traditionally been a compliance machine.??? So obviously he's envisioning a new definition.

He pointed to the i3 program and the Teacher Incentive Fund as examples of this broader strategy. ???I promise you that we are striving every day to transform our work. I want the department instead to become an engine of innovation that recognizes success and scales up best practices at the local level.???

He concluded his thoughts on these issues by repeating one of his favorite lines: that the federal government should be tight on goals and loose on means.

Pieced together, a slightly clearer picture starts to emerge. If I'm reading it right, it's something along the lines of ???The feds will embrace national standards and assessments; invest in new ideas and successful practices; and allow states and districts to control most decisions unless underserved kids are getting hurt.???

If this is a faithful rendering of the Secretary's view, the Department has a solid foundation on which to build. But huge questions remain: How far can the feds go with regard to disadvantaged students???How do you remain loose on means and still hold states accountable for billions of dollars? How does IDEA shift away from compliance? How does ED transition from a regulatory body to the NIH of education?

As I wrote above, developing a comprehensive, coherent philosophy on these matters is terribly hard, and we're watching ED go through the sausage-making phase. I give them credit.

Let's hope, when all's said and done, that we look back on this progress like the Beatles Anthology???which shows how impeccable final products typically evolve from messy drafts???and not like the making of Chinese Democracy???a long, agonizing wait that ultimately leaves you wishing for more.

-Andy Smarick

Last week, Secretary Duncan gave a long talk to the National Conference of State Legislatures that was really three different speeches in one--and actually three very important speeches at that. One was on policy, one on federalism, and one on an important element of the ARRA.

Each mini-speech really deserves its own treatment, so I've done one on each.

The one on policy was like a Ali-Foreman.

The one on federalism shows progress on a tough issue.

And the one on the ARRA includes a critically important and meaningful acknowledgment.

-Andy Smarick

The annual U.S. News and World Report high school rankings have been released. Thomas Jefferson HS in Alexandria, VA takes number 1 (again). But more interesting is a break down of top charter schools and top schools serving significant portions of socioeconomically-disadvantaged children (based on free and reduced-price lunch stats). Two charter schools made it into the top 10 of all public schools: Pacific Collegiate School in Santa Cruz, CA (ranked 7) and BASIS Tucson in Tucson, AZ (ranked 9). Connecticut had the most high-performing high schools out of all fifty states. Check out the entire list here.

--Stafford Palmieri

We've expended many words??on this blog and??other forums on the role of philanthropies in education. Especially now that they tend to have very specific and well-honed visions for reform that inform their giving strategies, evaluating just how much or how little influence they exercise over the various levels of education governance is a worthwhile endeavor. For example, Checker??lamented how closely Gates was working with the Department of Education, while??others thought it a waste that Ford had funded some more mainstream (status-quo, if you will) outfits like the AFT's Teacher Innovation Fund.

These same questions have been raised over the latest bit of news from LA: a number of high-level LAUSD positions??are being privately funded. Yes, that means the city saves the money that would otherwise be going towards their salaries, some of which top $100,000 per annum (before benefits). But it also means that the funders have some say in the role those individuals play and on a bigger level, district policy as a whole. I don't mean to imply that this influence is a negative thing; to the contrary, the dollars of Eli Broad, for example, which fund the salary of Matt Hill, whose job it is to oversee LAUSD's school turnaround/outsourcing project, have propelled this particular worthy initiative. But other philanthropies have supported less-worthy and less-successful city-level district-run initiatives in other cities such as??New York and??D.C. Arguably, those projects would not have been possible without the outside cash. So on the one hand, we get the benefit of public bureaucracies being subjected to private-sector screening and auditing practices. On the other, we get districts responding to private-sector funding strategies that might or might not be any good, with hardly any outside metric for judging them, and the cash to make them smashing successes or terrible failures. And??we also sometimes get organizations funding both--the good and the bad, the public and the private, the charter schools and the teachers' unions.

So where's the strategy behind all of this? Outfits like Gates seem to literally be funding??everyone. (What would happen if Gates and it's billions suddenly disappeared is an another interesting question we'll save for another day.) I'm sure someone there could explain to me how this strategy fits into their larger plan for education, but on the face of it, I'm not buying the "fund our friends" and "bribe our enemies" gambit. Education is definitely better off from Gates', Ford's, Broad's and other's extraordinary generosity, but how can an organization make objective purposeful decisions about its dollars when it has its hands in so many cookie jars?

Quotable:

"When I go back to my school district and meet with the kids in classrooms, the questions they're asking me are, ???Dr. Robinson, will we still have this? Will we still have sports? Will we still have music? Will we still have robotics?'"

-L. Oliver Robinson, president of the New York State Council of School Superintendents

New York Times: Paterson Sued Over School Payments

Notable:

20:

Percent of high school dropouts nationwide who test in the gifted range. Nearly 90??percent of those students were earning passing grades when they left school.

Las Vegas Sun: Jump starting a proposed academy for the county's top??students

Quick! Somebody translate Tom Loveless’s latest Fordham study, Tracking and Detracking, into German. A recent education-reform proposal in Hamburg, Germany (one of two German city-states, which make their own education policy like the other German Länder), has sparked a heated debate about tracking. Today, Hamburg students attend Grundschule, or elementary school, until age 10, at which point they enter one of six different high school tracks based on their academic records and teacher recommendations. The state government’s proposal would extend elementary school from four to six years, meaning students would enter secondary education at 12 (equivalent to grade 6) instead of 10 (grade 4); reduce the number of high school tracks from six to two, both of which would offer the Abitur college entrance examination; and eliminate parents’ right to choose their children’s schools, since pushy middle-class parents often game the system. “Social distance is diminished when children learn longer together,” explains Hamburg’s education minister, Christa Goetsch. This view is compounded by the fact that a middle-class Hamburger is 4.5 times more likely than a working-class child with the same grades to get into the most academically-oriented high schools--and secondary-education tracks are highly predictive of socioeconomic status and future career path. The state of Berlin (the other city-state) has already extended Grundschule to age 12 with nominal effect, but minimizing tracks and eliminating choice are untried in the German system. Even supporters of American-style tracking, such as this fly, must admit that Germany’s ancient version is in need of some changes; deciding in fourth grade that a child will never go to an elite college is much too deterministic for our taste. But Hamburgers had better be careful not to toss the Käse out with the Brot; high achieving kids still deserve an opportunity for challenge.

“The angst in Hamburg,” The Economist, December 10, 2009

If only the health care system were as transparent as the market for yoga classes. Every medical procedure would have a clear and incontrovertible price tag, no patient would be banned from consulting the doctor of his choice (as long as he’s willing and able to pay), and risk would be incorporated rationally into premium prices. Or so goes the argument in this lively National Review free-market tractate. As Kevin Williamson puts it, “A good rule of thumb: Fear the man who says he will make things rational by ignoring reality--and ignoring prices is ignoring reality.” While his treatise only touches on education, and he may be overly idealistic about the feasibility of putting a price tag on the wares of private or public bureaucracies, the general point about transparency is certainly worthwhile. Per-pupil spending in education continues to rise, yet it’s difficult to know exactly where all the money is going. Luckily, a handful of analysts are doing some difficult and overdue data-mining: most notably, the Finance, Spending, and Productivity Project at the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education. They’ve put price tags on art courses vs. math courses (hint: the latter cost a lot less), and on sports vs. extended school hours. Other researchers have found that consumers (parents) actually modify their opinions significantly when they have access to the price (salary) of teachers. And let’s be honest, it’s rare that government bureaucracies take a close-enough look at their bottom lines when they aren’t spending their own money.

“Priceless Is Worthless,” Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, December 21, 2009

If you thought a reality TV show like MTV’s new “Jersey Shore” could never be educational, well, you were right. The new series, which features eight Italian-American boys and girls living together in a house in New Jersey for the summer of 2009, hit a new low, or rather, a cast member literally hit a new low--the floor. A bar outing last August turned sour when cast member Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi got decked in the face by an intoxicated jerk who had swiped the cast’s drinks off the bar. The video clip blazed around the internet, inciting a tabloid storm about whether or not MTV will include the violent segment in next week’s episode (they will not). So what’s the edu-angle? It turns out that the puncher was a New York public-school (gym) teacher named Brad Ferro. He’s since been put on administrative leave and placed in--you guessed it--a NYC teacher detention center, a.k.a. “rubber room.” Maybe now, Ferro can start his own rubber room reality show revealing the true goings-on inside possibly the worst compromise ever made between district and union. Of course, he’ll need his own nickname. Good thing you can generate your own “Jersey Shore” moniker online. From now on, Gadfly will be known as Thomas “T-Muscle” Fordham.

“'Jersey Shore' slugger is a Qns. teacher,” by Yoav Gonen and Lorena Mongelli, The New York Post, December 11, 2009