I feel like we've turned reporting on the shenanigans in the Big Apple into a weekly event. The latest? Overfunding schools that are slated to close in 2010. Sure, we can't just rip the mats out from under these schools as they head for the exit, but let's not also give them double the average per-pupil student funding. That's right, at least five schools are getting as much as $28,000 per kid . The NYC average is $14,000. According to the NY Post , all of this is due to some funding glitch that creates a lag in budget cuts for schools with declining enrollments to temper the shock. Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx, for example, kept an extra $2 million even though student enrollment dropped from last year's 687 to this year's 303. What are these schools doing with the extra dough? Spending it of course--on SMART boards, copies of Obama's memoir Dreams of My Father for the entire school, and a grand piano, to name a few. As one teacher put it, "I have no clue why this is going on." Neither do I.

Fordham President Checker Finn discusses Fordham's Open Letter,??new research, school funding, and more Bill Bennett's Morning in America??radio show this morning, December 30. You can listen to the interview here.

In response to the Washington Post's unfair article about a pseudo-scandal at the D.C. Public Charter School Board--for which the Post editorial board has since tried to make amends --yesterday's paper ran an op-ed by charter supporters Kevin Chavous and Robert Cane . They make a number of good points. Perhaps most perceptively, they note that the city has not always played fairly with charter schools, creating a need for the facility loans that the Post decried:

D.C. law requires that charters be given first crack at empty school buildings, before condo developers or non-educational city agencies can bid for them. Yet the city has in most instances denied charters unused school facilities, forcing them into the commercial loan market to pay high costs for spaces that are often inadequate.

The issue of these bank loans was raised recently in The Post , leading some to confuse the freedom that charters enjoy with a lack of accountability and oversight. Charters do have overseers: They are accountable to parents who choose them for their children and to their regulatory body, the Public Charter School Board, a nationally renowned model of accountability. For 12 years, this board has been doing what the city has just begun for traditional schools: holding charters to high standards, tackling under-performance and replacing ineffective school leaders.

They also debunk the myth, spread by the Post , that charters are "flush with funds":

In fact, both types of public school are funded under the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula, which ensures that students in the same grade or at the same level of special education are funded equally. About $3,000 per student goes to charters to pay for facilities, while DCPS schools receive about $5,000 per student from the city government's capital budget. The big foundations make grants to both types of schools.

Fordham found similar results in its (somewhat dated) study of charter and district funding (pdf). Though the charter formula intends funding to be equitable in D.C., in 2002-03 charters received about $2,100 less in facilities funding per-pupil than did the district schools, leading to a total funding gap of $3,552. Charters thus received, on average, about 22 percent less than district schools.

No, that's not a typo. According to this front-page Washington Post article from Saturday, that's what Ohio governor Ted Strickland is preparing to request, along with Democratic governors from Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts.

Surely the group doesn't intend this to be??an annual??payment; the entire education system spends about $550 billion per year, so their proposal would amount to a 45% increase in per-pupil spending, overnight. They can't possibly be that crazy. But even if they mean this to be spread out over, say, five years, $50 billion per year would more than double what Uncle Sam contributes now. This is big, big money.

But it's not inconceivable. Some sort of "revenue sharing" for the states is practically a foregone conclusion (Paul Krugman argues that those cutting state spending now amount to "Fifty Herbert Hoovers," ), and admitting that most of that money will go to the schools (which suck up the majority of state funds) would be a bit of truth in advertising.

Writing yesterday in the New York Times , Matt Miller offers some ideas about the strings that should go along with said revenue . Mostly he wants to use the cash to equalize funding between rich and poor schools, but he'd push for various reforms too:

Federal cash could also be offered to lift teacher salaries for high-poverty schools. States or districts that accept the money would have to allow higher pay for the best teachers or those in scarce specialties like math and science, defer or eliminate tenure (or link it to student achievement gains), and make it easier to fire bad teachers. These districts could pay top teachers up to $150,000 a year, attracting a new generation of talent to America's toughest classrooms.

Eduwonk Andy riffs on Matt's piece to offer some strings of his own :

With the kind of money Matt is talking about Washington could exert even more leverage with an eye toward increasing productivity although perhaps in less sexy ways.??????For example, a serious effort to put the federal government on track to meet its financial obligations under the federal special education law - IDEA -could be coupled with requirements to curb the over-identification of students for special education.????????Federal aid could be tightly linked to even??more robust efforts around data systems than we're seeing today, especially in laggard states.?? Perhaps you could even try for the national standards moonshot via??more??interstate collaboration or some derivative of it around enhanced benchmarking and transparency around standards and assessments.

All this grandiose thinking must be giving George Will a heart attack. Just yesterday he wrote that "Today, there is more Johnsonian confidence in government's competence than at any time since Johnson's policies shattered such confidence. The resurgence of confidence began under today's Texan president." By which he??refers to...the No Child Left Behind??Act, with its "Great Society-style ambition and race-conscious rhetoric." (If that sounds??familiar, its because Will quoted our good friend Rick Hess .)

So there will be a federal bailout of the states, and it will come with strings attached. Pushing for greater equity in school finance systems wouldn't be the worst idea, particularly if done along the lines of weighted-student funding . Neither would Andy's suggestions.??But what's most likely is that Uncle Sam's intentions and his impact won't come any where near matching, as unintended consequences??creep in. You know, just like with the Great Society.

Or so a study released yesterday by the Education Trust has found. The report, No Accounting for Fairness , looks at funding patterns in the state's fourteen largest school districts; it uses average teacher salaries, which typically make up 80-90% of school expenditures, to evaluate whether extra funds given to these districts for poor children are actually being spent in high-poverty schools, assuming that salaries are positively correlated with teacher experience. The study then uses teacher salaries to estimate per-pupil spending by school.

The findings are revealing: only three of the fourteen districts, EdTrust found, had higher average teacher salaries at high-poverty schools. In the other eleven districts, lower-poverty schools paid their teachers less--and (we can assume) have less experienced teachers. In Akron, for example, the average difference between a high-poverty and low-poverty school teacher's average salary was $4,000. Furthermore, based on these salary numbers, these eleven districts are spending less per-pupil in high-poverty schools than they are in low-poverty schools.

While it has yet to be proven that more money is the silver bullet solution to low achievement for poor students, we can safely say that it does take more money to educate them. Ohio has done much to equalize funding between more and less affluent districts, but as this study shows, there are still spending disparities within districts that may mitigate those effects.

Terry Ryan, Fordham's vice president for Ohio programs and policies, had this to say in this morning's Columbus Dispatch :

The (teacher) seniority system should be changed.??They provide a disincentive to get your best teachers with your toughest kids. We are paying the same or less for the kids that have the greatest needs, and that's upside down.

Rick Hess and I have a piece on National Review Online today about President Bush's education legacy. I guess you might say it's not really in the Christmas spirit. We argue that Bush??sold out??his principles when negotiating the No Child Left Behind act:

The compromises that the administration struck...led Bush to champion a law that dramatically expanded the federal role in education; adopted an explicitly race-based conception of school accountability; focused on "closing achievement gaps" to the exclusion of all other objectives; proffered a pie-in-the-sky civil rights-oriented approach to school "accountability" (even for students with cognitive disabilities and English language learners); created a burdensome federal mandate around teacher qualifications that hampers outfits such as Teach For America; devised a compliance apparatus that is even more burdensome than the previous regime; and significantly increased federal spending on education.

But we were just warming up:

Decades ago, Newt Gingrich and other reform-minded conservatives used to savage Bob Dole as a "tax collector for the welfare state" - arguing that "green eyeshade" Republicans were simply enabling Democrats who gleefully maneuvered the budget balancers into backing the tax increases needed to fund expansive programs. Democrats got the credit while Republicans got tagged as grim-faced disciplinarians. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that Bush permitted himself to become the "hall monitor for the civil rights lobby" - taking the hits from angry suburbanites and the blame for an unpopular law, while civil rights groups basked in their new status and doubled down by pushing for new and more aggressive federal programs.

It should surprise no one that the "Democrats for Education Reform" love No Child Left Behind. It's a progressive law, through and through, and I suspect that 2009 will be the year when most conservatives (and most Republicans) abandon it entirely.

Andy Rotherham, the go-to New Dem on education for the better part of the last decade, doesn't seem to grasp the opportunity at his fingertips. First in the "Open Letter" to the New Administration and Congress published by Fordham last week, and then in this National Review Online piece by Rick Hess and me today, several of us on the right are arguing that the No Child Left Behind act is, as Robert Gordon once wrote, a "the sort of law liberals once dreamed about."

You might think that Andy would be heartened by this development, claim credit for pulling the wool over the Bush Administration's eyes, and mock those who have called him a closet Republican. ("See--the Bushies are closet Democrats," he might say.)

Instead, he reacted to our NRO article by writing that "the fight for the Republican soul on education policy is on." Sure, that's true enough, but at a time when the Democrats for Education Reform are being accused of adopting the Republican agenda, you might think he'd point out that:

--While accountability was a conservative idea, a race-based accountability system, and one that seeks to redistribute resources, is a liberal idea;

--While school choice was a conservative idea, limiting it to public schools, and putting local districts in charge, is a liberal idea;

--While giving failing schools a lot of tough love was a conservative idea, doing it from Washington is a liberal idea.

(Do I sound like Mitt Romney?)

Liberals and conservatives didn't compromise to hatch No Child Left Behind; conservatives followed President Bush's lead and got on board a liberal agenda. With Bush headed out of town, expect Republicans to vacate this position, and to act like a center-right party again. Which will show just how "progressive" and left-of-center the New Dems really are. So Andy, celebrate! You're not a Republican!

Happy holidays to one and all.

According to an op-ed in this morning's Wall Street Journal, Pennsylvania has the highest incidence of teacher strikes in the country. In fact, 110 school districts are at risk of teachers going on strike in the next 6 months. PA apparently has the ninth highest average teacher salary in the country--$54,970 in 2006-2007. Other interesting facts: 42% of the country's teacher strikes occur in the Quaker State and carry no consequences for teachers or unions (some states fine unions for strikes or make teachers give up salary for days missed). Worst of all, in 2007-2008, kids who were chucked out of classrooms while teachers were on strike were on these strike-vacations for an average of 13 days. That's a lot of school days to miss!

Usually school districts see themselves as competing with charter schools for students. Not the Recovery School District. Superintendent Paul Vallas plans on increasing the market share of charters in New Orleans by converting more schools to charter schools. The schools under consideration for the switch are mostly low performing--and Vallas hopes that their new found charter status under private leadership might be the ticket to seeing test scores rise. Higher performing and career schools are also under consideration. The plan has the support of State Superintendent Paul Pastorek, too, which is key since all charter switches will require state approval. Vallas explains:

"This is the tide. You're swimming against the tide if you don't embrace this approach. That's why I came down here," Vallas said. "If you create a district of charters and independent schools, you insulate the district from the adverse effects of having a monopolistic education system."

The next step is figuring out an accountability system for schools serving K-2. Since students don't take the LA test, iLEAP, until third grade, there's little way to evaluate charter schools serving younger students.

I like the sound of this plan, if only because of Vallas' attitude about it. It's nice to hear a superintendent not being defensive about declining district enrollment and willing to actually put students' interests first. We'll have to wait and see if private supervision will turn these lagging charter-converts into academic successes.

We lambasted WaPo last week for its inappropriate and overly harsh treatment of DC Charter School Board Chairman Tom Nida (here and here , too). This Saturday, the Post amended its position with the following:

Much of the credit for the success of the charters must go to the volunteer public charter school board, which, in the span of a dozen years, has overseen the growth of a sizable school system. The Post investigation raised questions about whether its members, in particular??Chairman Thomas A. Nida , paid sufficient attention to conflict-of-interest rules. It's important that the matter be investigated, and both D.C. Attorney General??Peter J. Nickles and the city's campaign finance office are looking into the situation. The board should revise its practices to bring better transparency to its actions. But calls for a purge of board members are premature. Consider, for instance, that there were sound educational reasons for some of the actions that have been called into question (such as closing schools that were failing to adequately educate their students). It would be wrong to discount the important work done by the board, under Mr. Nida's leadership, in nurturing charter schools.