More evidence that the education components of the ARRA have been about jobs, jobs, jobs.

The Council on American Private Education (CAPE) has submitted superb public comments on the i3 fund. They address the Department's unfortunate and unnecessary decision to exclude nonpublic schools from this competition (for background, see??here and here).

It's a quick read and very much worth the time if you are interested in the i3. In addition to asking a few very important questions, the document makes three particularly forceful arguments:

Religious and independent schools have an outstanding record of??serving high-need students...Many private schools provide innovative and successful??approaches to serving students at risk. The Cristo Rey Network of Schools, for example, which educates inner-city??students through an innovative work-study model, has 99 percent of its graduates accepted into college.

Numerous well-implemented, well-designed, large-scale experimental studies (the kind the Education??Department is looking for to support Scale-up Grants) have documented the effects of various private school??programs. Patrick Wolf, the lead researcher for the U.S. Department of Education's gold-standard study of the D.C.??Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows students to attend religious and independent schools, recently??reported that the program ???has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal??government's official education research arm so far."

If the Education Department is interested in finding and scaling-up successful programs to improve performance,??close the achievement gap, and prepare students for college, the workplace, and life, it should enlist the efforts of all??schools???public and private???that have a history of exemplary accomplishment.?? Excluding an entire group of??proven programs from eligibility for the fund is not in the best interests of the nation or its students.

Very well said.

Very big news out of New Haven, CT, though it's a story likely to be completely overlooked.

Alex Johnston, head of the stellar Connecticut-based ed reform group ConnCan, has been named to the New Haven school board. This represents the latest episode in a remarkable volte-face in the city's approach to education.

For years, Mayor John DeStefano and Superintendent Reginald Mayo were anything but cutting edge reformers. This is despite the city's being home to the amazing charter school Amistad and headquarters of Achievement First, that school's CMO.

The mayor apparently had a major change of heart not long ago. He joined Amistad's board of directors. Next, the school system hired a leading reformer from Joel Klein's shop to be an assistant superintendent. Now, Johnston, a top-notch reform agitator, is on the school board.

It's not clear what caused this shift. Maybe it's a combination of AF's and??ConnCan's??great work in the city and the growing popularity of ed reform generally. Maybe Yale's leadership had something to do with it. Maybe the mayor and superintendent just tired of their schools' persistent low-performance.

Whatever the reasons, this is a set of very exciting developments. DeStefano deserves credit. I hope we see similar changes elsewhere.

Not long ago we presented a graphic illustrating the gross discrepancy between Ohio's achievement test scores and those from NAEP. Such "grade inflation" is common in the post-NCLB era, where many states appear to select standards and assessments - not based solely on academic rigor - but in order to ensure that more students are proficient?? and to bump up their state scores.

Unsurprisingly, the recent release of math results from the National Assessment of Education Progress confirms this trend, with 78 percent of Ohio fourth graders passing the state's math test, compared to only 45 percent who passed NAEP. In eighth grade, the gap is even wider, with 71 percent of students passing the Ohio math exam, but just 36 percent passing NAEP.

??ODE vs. NAEP Math Proficiency Averages, 2008-2009

Sources: Ohio Department of Education; National Assessment of Educational Progress in Math, 2009

Even worse than this year's low pass rates of 45 and 36 percent for fourth and eighth-graders, respectively, is that:

"While Ohio students have a higher average score than students nationwide and those scores are better than they were in the early 1990s, there has been little improvement in the fourth or eighth grades since 2005"

And

"There has been no significant change in the gap between Ohio's white and black fourth- or eighth-graders for roughly a decade."

We've said it before and we'll say it again: such discrepancies (in Ohio as well as in other states) point to a need for national (common) standards. As Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said at Fordham's conference last week, to have these proficiency gaps "is a huge disservice to students." We'd argue that it's also a huge disservice for all of those parents, educators, and lawmakers trying to make sense out of NAEP test scores and get a straight answer to the question "how are Ohio students really doing?"

Tomorrow Duncan will deliver a speech to NASBE members on the role of the federal government in education reform.?? I agree with K-12 Politics that this part of Duncan's prepared remarks is refreshing:??

"I want to be a partner in your success, not the boss of it. But I'm not willing to be a silent partner who puts a stamp of approval on the status quo. I plan to be an active partner. As a nation, we need a federal voice encouraging our shared goal of success for every student and stimulating innovations to reach those goals. But I'm also mindful of this. For nearly 200 years, our federal government was a silent partner. It mostly sat on the sideline while a shameful achievement gap persisted."

Also,

"In cases where children are being underserved or neglected, we have a moral obligation to intervene, and we won't allow fear of over-reaching to stop us."

While the rhetoric is nothing new, the difference between Duncan and scores of others using such no-excuses language is that, well, Duncan's got a lot of money to bargain with. And, he represents an insurgence of new thinking in the Democratic Party, which people are noticing and reiterating. In today's New York Times, Kristof writes:

?? "Democrats have too often resisted reform and stood by as generations of disadvantaged children have been cemented into an underclass by third-rate schools. President Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, are trying to change that."

The media's recent antipathy toward antiquated union practices (Kristof lists a bunch of examples, as did Whitmire and Rotherham a few weeks ago), along with Duncan's and Obama's "new Democrat" mentality are helping to create momentum for many (long overdue) education reforms. Let's hope it continues. ??

??

This NY Times article highlights some folks who took alternative routes to become teachers, leaving their primary careers or retirement to complete fast-track programs into the classroom. One of programs mentioned is the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE). Ron Halverson, 52 retired after several years in engineering and finance, but then used the ABCTE program to become a special education teacher at a high school in Boise, Idaho, according to the piece. And Bill DeLoach, 59, worked in business sales and management but left that, completed the ABCTE in science and now teaches high school physics in St. Louis. Among the other programs mentioned in the piece is Career Switchers, based in Virginia.

Quotable:

"Everybody's using the [budget] numbers now to their own benefit, so they can blame somebody else for these teacher firings...My job is to make sure the city balances its budget. You can just blame Jack Evans."

-D.C. Council member Jack ??Evans (D-Ward 2)

Washington Post: Schools Pay When Rhee Snubs Donors

Notable:

45%:

Percentage of Ohio fourth graders proficient in math, according to NAEP.?? State tests say more than 78 percent of fourth-graders are proficient in math.

Columbus Dispatch: Ohio students' math proficiency doesn't add up

We're tweeting from the Partners in Education Network (PIE-NET) conference in Denver today. Follow our Twitter feed @educationgadfly or the conference hashtag #PIE09.

The education world is aflutter today. The just-released NAEP math scores aren't so hot, causing handwringing among many policy and research types and a degree of schadenfreude among long-time NCLB critics.

To be sure, the results aren't great, but they certainly don't portend the end of the world. Scores are up in 8th grade but in 4th grade they are flat (virtually all 4th grade group scores are flat too). We need to be concerned that the achievement gap is still with us and that overall learning isn't increasing as rapidly as we would like. But it's important to put these results in context.

NAEP math scores have been increasing consistently since 1990. Had we had 19 years of flat results and one year of increases in one subject, we wouldn't celebrate. Similarly, we shouldn't press the panic button over one year of stalled growth in one subject. Yes, we need to take stock and redouble our efforts, but this is far from convincing evidence that NCLB failed or education reform is doomed.

Sol Stern turns in an interesting post about the recent Time Magazine article on Catholic schools, providing some??very good examples from the Big Apple. ??(Lest you think this issue is going away, here's another example of closures.)

If we're interested in good schools for disadvantaged kids, we ought to do something about this.