This comprehensive report neatly summarizes what we know about teacher effectiveness, turnover, distribution, and tenure--and their relation to the overrepresentation of low quality teachers in high poverty schools. Miller and Chait start off by examining the concept of teacher quality, arguing that traditional qualifications and licensure matter far less than value-added measures and experience. While allowing that value-added measures aren't perfect, they note that these are "at least as good as subjective ratings made by principals, at least where the very most effective and very least effective teachers are concerned." A noteworthy point, considering that it's often this same principal subjectivity that tenure advocates cite as justifying tenure in the first place. Next up is teacher turnover. Miller and Chait build the case that not only are high-quality teachers distributed unevenly thanks to poor working conditions, HR practices, and personal preferences, but that teacher turnover patterns exacerbate the disparity. "Effectiveness breeds contentment," they say, i.e. effective teachers are more likely to stay put. But high-poverty schools often have fewer effective teachers to begin with, and the good ones often leave quickly for better schools or other lines of work. Why? In this realm, opposites do not attract. Good teachers want to work alongside other good teachers, and teachers generally seek schools where they share "an ethnic or cultural affinity." Thus, "a vicious cycle" is born wherein bad schools attract fewer effective teachers and then lose them to better schools, making it ever harder to attract the next crop of talent. Ineffective teachers, meanwhile, are passed around like hot potatoes by bad schools, since tenure makes it difficult to fire them. The authors don't engage in an all-out attack on tenure but do urge policymakers to reexamine present policies. "The role that tenure policies play in preserving a skewed distribution of teacher quality cannot be ignored," they conclude. Indeed. The full report is here.

On Tuesday, President-Elect Obama ended weeks of speculation by selecting Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan to be his secretary of education. The conventional wisdom is that Duncan is a "consensus" pick, bridging the Democratic Party's major divide on education.

The camps on either side of this divide have been described, variously, as the establishment versus the reformers, incrementalists versus disrupters, or, by some, the true progressives versus closet Republicans. Let us add another pairing: the System Defenders versus the Army of the Potomac.

System Defenders--including the teacher unions, other traditional education groups, and their friends on Capitol Hill--believe that the public school system is basically sound but needs additional resources to be more effective. Their view of the federal role resembles the pre-NCLB version with scads of programs and complexities--albeit a lot more money and a lot less accountability.

Meanwhile, members of the Army of the Potomac--including civil rights groups such as Education Trust, "New Dem" bastions such as Education Sector and the Progressive Policy Institute, and putatively bipartisan initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Commission--hold generally sound instincts about reform. They see unions and school boards as barriers to achievement and equity gains; they favor holding schools to account for results; they would reward success; and (up to a point) empower parents. Their Achilles heel is a near-boundless faith in Washington's ability to accomplish these and more whopping improvements in K-12 education. They downplay the unintended consequences caused by NCLB (and other well-intended federal statutes); indeed, most of them would ratchet up Uncle Sam's pressure on states and local schools.

These two camps have been wrangling all year, and it's widely understood that Duncan's job is to forge a truce by finding compromises and commonalities. (To the right of these contending Democratic factions is where many Republicans find themselves, among what we call Local Controllers. They want Uncle Sam to butt out of education policy--but to keep sending money. In the current political environment, however, Duncan and his boss can mostly ignore them--at least ‘til they need sixty Senate votes.)

How can Obama and Duncan find common ground between the System Defenders on the left and the Army of the Potomac in the center? One good way would be turning to Reform Realism, which we introduce today in an "Open Letter" to the President-Elect, Secretary-Designate, and the 111th Congress.

We Reform Realists share some core assumptions with the Army of the Potomac. We embrace standards, assessment, and accountability; we believe that America's achievement gaps are morally unacceptable, socially divisive, and politically unsustainable; and we recognize that for the U.S. to remain secure and prosperous in a dangerous, shrinking and flattening world, our education system must become far more effective.

But as Arne Duncan has learned in Chicago, we also believe that federal action too often yields unintended and undesirable consequences. Uncle Sam would be wise to adopt medicine's maxim of "first do no harm." His education levers are few and none too powerful and, in the real world, he can do little to coerce states and districts to do things they don't want to do or are organizationally incapable of doing--much less to do those things well. School reform is a heavy lift and the application of federal carrots and (less commonly) sticks can only go so far.

We favor a targeted, strategic federal role in K-12 education with Washington sticking to the essential elements that it can do well (and that others do less well)--but leaving the rest to states, communities, educators, and families. In particular, Uncle Sam should:

1. Foster common standards and tests. While asking federal officials themselves to set standards and create tests would be perilous, the President could task the governors with agreeing on what students should know in core subjects at key stages of their schooling. Tests and transparency should follow. (Watch for an announcement tomorrow from the National Governors Association et al.)

 2. Provide flexible dollars targeted at disadvantaged children. Principals and superintendents, facing the sun beaming down on their schools' results, should be free to spend federal dollars as they see fit.

 3. Offer incentives to states and districts to embark upon promising reforms. One way is to enhance the federal Title I payments to jurisdictions that push for such innovations as performance pay for teachers and more quality school choices for families. 

4. Produce high-quality data and solid research on what does and doesn't work. Today, education R & D and statistics is the caboose of federal education policy when it should be the engine.

5. Continue to protect the civil rights of individual students and educators.

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam should eliminate some items from his job description:

1. Oversight of state accountability systems. Once we have national tests that yield reliable, comparable data on pupil and school performance, states should be free--under the watchful eyes of their own citizens--to decide for themselves which schools are succeeding and what to do about those that aren't.

2. Mandated school sanctions. Along with much else, we would eliminate NCLB's school transfer, free tutoring, and restructuring provisions.

3. "Highly qualified teacher" dictates. If reformers want to encourage changes in the human capital pipeline, they should incentivize it, not make rules about it.

Sure, there's more--the Open Letter awaits you--but you can already glimpse the contours of a "Reform Realist" approach that's oriented to systemic change yet humble about Washington's role. Such a strategy could form the basis for a grand compromise. For System Defenders, it would mean an end to federally-mandated sanctions on low-performing schools. For Local Controllers, it would mean a much lighter regulatory load emanating from Washington. And for reformers, including faithful foot soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, it would mean an environment with national standards and tests coupled with far greater transparency, data, and research--all contributing to a healthy environment for reform at the levels of government that actually run public education.

Yes, it's a dramatically different approach than we've grown used to. But it's a terrific fit for Duncan, and maybe for Obama, because it recognizes that Washington's powers in this sphere are limited and places like Chicago have accumulated much relevant experience and wisdom. It points a path out of today's NCLB political thicket. Most importantly, it might actually work.

This piece also appeared today on National Review Online.

Here's an original (and fallacious) thought: when times get rough, absolve children of the need to learn math. That, at least, is the story coming out of Oregon, where budget woes have allegedly forced the state to drop its brand-new graduation requirements in algebra, geometry, and statistics. Set only six months ago, the new bar would turn the already existing high school state math test into a graduation requirement for this year's crop of 9th graders. But since more than half of sophomores typically fail the exam on the first try, the state board of education felt it would be too daunting a challenge to ramp up student performance in time to require total math literacy by 2012. We can't help but wonder if this is a lawsuit-avoidance strategy, as some courts have looked askance at states that set tough graduation expectations but don't provide all manner of extra help to struggling students. Or maybe the economy is just an easy excuse for policymakers to take the easy way out. You know what they say: when the going gets tough, the tough... run in the other direction?

"Oregon to delay math requirement for graduation," by Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian, December 12, 2008

Arne Duncan isn't the only one who has had a busy week! Fordham's Checker and Mike have been quoted in numerous articles over the past few days, giving their views on Obama's pick for education secretary. Those have included pieces in The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Chronicle of Higher Ed, National Review Online, and more......!!

As a thinker tanker, I have to assume that this line in President-Elect Obama's speech yesterday was aimed at people like me:

When??Arne speaks to educators across America, it won't be from up in some ivory tower,* but from the lessons he's learned during his years changing our schools, from the bottom up.

But I take solace in knowing that Linda Darling-Hammond lives in an Ivory Tower too. So for today I'm going to take this as another promising sign that she's heading back to Palo Alto.

* By the way, wasn't it the Bush Administration that was famous for anti-intellectualism? This is the kind of rhetoric typically associated with the right. Interesting.

We are seeking a staff assistant for our D.C. office--if you want to join our terrific team, please read the job description and apply now!

That's the headline of a thoughtful letter in today's Washington Post, coming to the defense of Tom Nida, who's under fire from some who question whether his day job at United Bank conflicts with his role as chair of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. I came to his defense here, but today's letter-writer puts it best:

No one works harder than Thomas A. Nida to improve the educational outcomes of D.C. students. He is a tireless advocate for change in what is acknowledged to be a broken public school system. As thanks for his selfless service, The Post found it appropriate to pillory him on the front page... The implied message is that if you do business in the District, don't even think about volunteering in public affairs. Lord knows, if the District were to actually benefit from some of your volunteer work, your business might benefit as well, and that would constitute a conflict of interest! By this logic, only retirees, government employees and journalists would be qualified to serve on public boards.

This article has done enormous damage to the effort to engage volunteers from the business community in the hard and thankless task of fixing our public schools.

Well said.

Thomas Nida photograph from D.C. Public Charter School Board website

A colleague writes in to say:

The Duncan appointment is good news, however, I'm still hearing that LDH may get Institute for Education Sciences Commissioner.?? That is almost at the level of a classical tragedy--the??Roman sack of Carthage, the burning of the library at Alexandria.

She would destroy everything Russ Whitehurst built.?? It's like having a creationist head the National Science Foundation.

This is non-partisan position. ??We just want a well-respected researcher heading IES who will push rigorous, scientifically-based research on what works.??????

Every serious education researcher to whom I've spoken is aghast at the idea of her taking over the agency.??

What's the future for education reform now that Arne Duncan's been named education secretary? You can listen to Mike opining on this topic during last night's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (which also featured Andy Rotherham from Ed Sector) or listen to Checker and Michele Norris talking about the same issue on NPR's All Things Considered.

State Rep. Larry Wolpert, R-Hilliard, is completing his fourth term in the Ohio House and will leave the General Assembly because of term limits. Fearful of what looming public pension fund deficits would mean to future state budgets, he introduced House Bill 645 (see here) requiring that new public employees be enrolled in so-called defined-contribution pension plans, rather than the defined-benefit plans that are dominant now for teachers and school administrators. Wolpert shares his case for this change below. These comments do not necessarily reflect those of the Ohio Education Gadfly and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, but we think they are important to share with our readers. In fact, we recently issued a report on the State Teachers Retirement System and have commented on this issue in the past (see here).

In the last century at the height of the Industrial Age, it was common for employers to provide workers with pension benefits. Most of these pensions were based on a defined benefit: that is, a specific pension amount was based on years worked and salary earned. Now, in the 21^st century, it's becoming apparent that a defined-benefit pension program creates major liabilities for employers (including public-sector employers) and, in many instances, these liabilities cannot be met (see New York City as an example here). To remain competitive and still provide workers with a pension benefit, many private-sector pension plans have been converted to defined-contribution plans-plans in which the retirement benefit is based on contributions made to the pension plan by the employer and the worker. Since benefits are keyed to contributions, these plans are unlikely to have unfunded liabilities.

Around 70 years ago Ohio created a defined-benefit program for all state and local government workers. At the time, Ohioans were relatively well off and earned about 10 percent more than the average American. These government employee plans remain some of the best pension plans in the country-public or private. According to the Ohio Legislative Services Commission, Ohio government employee compensation now exceeds Ohio private-sector employee compensation by six percent, mainly because of the benefit of a defined-benefit pension.

However, Ohio, unfortunately, is not economically as rich as it was. We are, in fact, becoming poorer and grayer. Our economy is stagnant, we have lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and the state is barely maintaining its population level. Even before the current housing bubble burst, Ohio's per capita income was 10 percent below the national average. Out of the 50 states we rank 46^th in personal income growth. On average 1.5 percent more people move out of Ohio than move in. Ohioans who remain in the state are becoming older. The only reason we are not seeing population decline is births exceed deaths.

With the crash in the equities and real estate markets, there are even more concerns about preserving the commitments made to Ohio's government workers. If our state pension systems cannot make their financial commitments, ultimately Ohio's already hard-pressed taxpayers must make up the shortfall. State pension benefits are guaranteed under Ohio's constitution and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for meeting these commitments. Increasingly, Ohio's taxpayers are either retired (often before they want to be) and living on limited fixed incomes, or they're working in lower-paying jobs that have replaced higher-paying industrial jobs. If state pension systems run out of money because they cannot continue to pay these generous government pensions, Ohio taxpayers could easily be stuck with a bill for billions of dollars in pension promises.

I introduced House Bill 645 to short-circuit a looming financial disaster for the state that would be far greater than what we face now. The idea is to protect both the incomes of retired Ohio government workers and Ohio's taxpayers. The bill simply states that any new entrant into a state pension system must be under a defined-contribution plan instead of a defined-benefit plan. The intent of the bill is to reduce any future unfunded liabilities in the pension systems. There is no time in the 127^th General Assembly to pass this pension reform bill and I am leaving public service at the end of 2008. But I hope that this bill will be used in the next General Assembly as the basis for reform as financial pressure continues to grow on these generous government benefit programs.

by Larry Wolpert