I don't much cotton to this bloggish practice of holding internal conversations in public view, but this time I think Mike is over the top--and he didn't ask my advice before "publishing". He's right about NCLB's built-in flaws and the need to rethink the law??so as to set them right. A fair amount of that is statutory repair work; some, however,??is regulatory. Insofar as it's possible to repair NCLB unilaterally, i.e. by action of the executive branch alone, most??of what the Education Department announced today strikes me as steps in the right direction. Some of it involves imaginative new interpretations of the statutory language and??some is trying to rectify the Department's own regulation/implementation foul-ups the first time around. But better late than never, I say. Why should??Margaret Spellings leave office with problems undealt with (the more so when they're problems she caused or helped to cause)??

Fall Intern Molly Kennedy offers up this reading:

Alyson Klein of Education Week details a few tight Congressional races in which battling candidates have different views on education issues and how to deal with NCLB. As we all know, the economy has sucked the life out of most other issues and, as a result, despite the need for reauthorization, most candidates offer little more than "broad, largely critical rhetoric on the law without much policy detail," writes Klein. Read more here.

Right now, Amber, Suzannah and I are at the National Press Club for the University of Washington School Finance Redesign Project's conclusionary panel. The report being released is the product of five years of work. The basic premise: schools will never provide quality education if the funding system is broken. Jacob Adams, the panel moderator, says the question to ask is: How can we translate resources into results?

It's going to start with understanding that the school system today is not structured to support ambitious learning goals and then reform the complicated and opaque finance system operations.

To do this, we must answer the following questions:

-How can we effectively deliver, manage and account for dollars?

-What can we do right now?

-How can the policy community support what's going on in schools?

-How can we learn more about school finance to continue matching dollars to increased student learning.

Sounds like these questions will be answered. Stay tuned...

Panelist James Guthrie of Vanderbilt University asked an interesting question that goes beyond the education community: "What do we do when we don't know what to do? What steps do we take when there is no clear technical guidance for policy?"

As explained by Guthrie, the latest School Finance Redesign Project report advocates:

-Specifying desired goals, but making these goals comprehensive enough to avoid goal displacement (i.e. getting side tracked)

-Making sure our measurement systems are aligned with these goals

-Establishing a comprehensive information system

-Determinig better methods of what works

-Putting the resources near those who deliver services

-Dismantling the current incentive system, which rewards getting as far away from students as possible.

Amber has asked a great question: "How do we marry reforming teacher salaries and weighted student funding?"

University of Washington's Paul Hill's response: "Weighted student funding would put restraints on the amount of money a school has and schools would have to determine which teachers they can afford. This adds a real world aspect to this."

How would one get the unions on board with this? Would there be base teacher salaries? Food for thought...

We've just returned from the School Finance Redesign Project Panel (and were caught in the rain, no less!) Here are some final thoughts:

Great ideas... not so practical. I'll give you two examples.

In the ideas area, I was struck by Guthrie's thoughts on the transformation of American education. 50 years ago, he asserts, you could drop out of high school and still get a job and have a productive, comfortable life. Today, those jobs that don't require education have either disappeared or moved overseas. As a result, we, as a nation, are facing a momentous task: educating everyone and educating them well. He proposes that we're the first modern, democratic, industrialized nation to confront this challenge. NCLB may be an "awkward instrument" but we are venturing into new territory.

Criticizing NCLB is the new "it" thing to do (presidential election, anyone?). I can almost hear someone saying, "It's an axe when we need a scalpel"...[cue laughter] The point is that Guthrie is largely right. Most countries don't even attempt to educate everyone or consider that doing so is a laudable goal. Take Germany, for example. It fits all of Guthrie's criteria (or those that I managed to scribble down during the event--there may have been more): modern, democratic, and industrialized. Yet children in Germany are tracked from age ten into college-bound, vocational, and remedial schools. There is no assumption in the German education system that every child deserves the chance to go to college. As The Economist so candidly puts it, "The cleverest go to??Gymnasien, the main route to university; the ordinary are sent to??Realschulen; and the dullards attend??Hauptschulen, often breeding-grounds for disaffection." (Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, is attempting to reform the system, but facing incredible resistance.) "The dullards?" That's an American lawsuit waiting to happen.

Now, I'm not saying that every student should actually go to college, but children in this country at least exist under the assumption that they could go to college if they wanted to--that they can learn if we figure out how to teach them most effectively. (Some might disagree that we teach students to believe in themselves--the teaching for social justice crowd comes to mind--but??I stand by my assertion that this country is a fountain of opportunities spilling over.) We talk about NCLB as if it were the antichrist--dumbing down education, teaching to the test, ruining children's lives left and right. But what was our education system like before NCLB? Despite its problems of structure and implementation, hasn't NCLB taught us something, at least? Would we know where to go next if we hadn't been where we were?

It's great to contemplate the ideological mindsets behind our schools but when Amber asked how we would couple teacher salaries with weighted student funding, none of the panelists could answer the question. As you can see below, I noted Paul Hill's response, but Jim Guthrie took a stab at the question first--and didn't answer it satisfactorily at all (actually if there was an answer in his response, somebody please let me know. I did not hear one). The problem is that we really do need an answer. Why? Under most school funding schemes currently in place, dollars are allocated based on the number of teachers, administrators, and programs (or that's how I understand it). If we have dollars following children as WSF calls for, how do we a) determine teacher salaries, b) determine teacher pay scales, and c) create collective bargaining agreements? While I appreciated and understood the "real world" aspect that would be injected into schools trying to make a bottom line, I also understand the "real world" aspect of teachers' unions and their guaranteed objections (read: outrage) to this scheme. I merely wish that Paul Hill and company had taken on this question in their report--and moved beyond the niceties that keep this conversation, again, in the land of policy--instead of practice.

Mike Antonucci wants everyone to know that AFT President Randi Weingarten only makes $350,000 a year.

(You heard it here first.)

As a Maryland resident I have to decide how to vote on the state's Question 2 next week, which would legalize slot machines and use the resulting revenue for education. And while the image of seniors throwing their social security checks down the slot machine toilet leaves me a little queasy, I've come to see this as a brilliant solution to the problems identified by radical Robert Samuelson last week. The financial pressure of baby boomers retiring en masse is likely to squeeze tax dollars that otherwise could have gone to the education of our young. So the slot machine solution is perfect, for it simply recoups a chunk of elderly-entitlement spending and hands it over to the next generation. Sure, it's less efficient than just trimming entitlements in the first place, but politics is the art of the possible, right?

A post from guest blogger and Fordham Director of Ohio Policy and Research Suzannah Herrmann.

As Stafford mentioned, we just returned from the National Press Club. Since today's presentation by the National Working Group on Funding Student Learning has some interesting implications for state policy, I thought I'd throw in my perspective on what this report could mean for policy in Ohio, Fordham's other base.

The report notes up front that "states will never educate all students to high standards unless they first fix the finance system that support's America's schools." This is not the same thing as calling for more money for schools, but rather it is a call for making sure we get more from the $500 billion Americans already spend annually on elementary and secondary education. This call has special resonance in our home state of Ohio where the Governor has staked his administration's reputation on "fixing" the state's school funding system. Ohio is one of 20 states that have been deemed "unconstitutional" by state high-court judges because funding levels were deemed insufficient. This report "Funding Student Learning" notes that between 1990 and 2005, average inflation-adjusted expenditures on education in America increased 29% to almost $11,000 per student. In Ohio, ten years (1997 to 2007) saw state per-pupil expenditures, using inflation adjusted dollars, rise 25% (from $7,500 to about $10,000). We must get more out of our educational spending and this report by the National Working Group on Funding Student Learning provides important guidance on how to start doing this. You can read the whole report??here.

Today's Friday, which means there's a pretty good chance your child is being taught by a substitute teacher. According to this new study by the Center for American Progress, public school teachers are more likely to be absent on Mondays and Fridays, and on any given day one in 20 teachers is out. Their absences add up to $4 billion a year in substitute teacher payments and associated administrative costs. USA Today's Greg Toppo reports that study author Raegan Miller suggests paying teachers for unused sick leave. Read more of the study here and read Greg's report here.

I really enjoy Andy Rotherham as a colleague and friend (you know, the way Joe Biden loves John McCain), but in this recent post he sounds an awful lot like Greg Marmalard, the Omega President in Animal House who thinks he's smarter than everyone else.

First some background. Last week, Andy and Sara Mead released a Brookings Institution report that called for a new federal role in supporting education entrepreneurs. At the release event, in an Education Week story, and in this post, I criticized Andy and Sara for failing to learn key lessons from the No Child Left Behind experience. Specifically, I found them to be overly optimistic that the feds would be able to convince states and locals to remove obstacles to education entrepreneurs (Jay Greene thinks so too)*; those of us in the Bush Administration sure did try our darndest to do this, particularly in the case of NCLB's public school choice and supplemental services provisions, to no avail. That's because, as I argued, the feds have few tools to coerce states and districts to do things they don't want to do and do them well. And that's what it takes to open the door to "scaling" promising innovations. I also found Andy and Sara to be somewhat na??ve to believe that they could pick winners and losers in their "Grow What Works" fund and not be accused of favoritism or cronyism.

So what was Andy's responses to these concerns? In a nutshell: Don't worry, those of us who will serve in the Obama administration will be smarter than you dummies in the Bush Administration. Or in his own words: "Mike's argument...seems to boil down to a belief that because the Bush Administration really screwed up some things like Reading First and Supplemental Services it means federal efforts in innovation more generally are bound to fail.?? That's one possible explanation, sure, but it means turning the wheel too far one way??to??get out of a skid.**???? Instead, another explanation is that??the Bush Administration just??screwed some things up and that while there are cautionary lessons to be learned, all is not lost."

I know it's been convenient for Andy and other Democratic reformers to blame any NCLB problems on us dummies inside the Bush Administration and "poor implementation." But now that the keys of 400 Maryland Avenue are (most likely) going to be handed over to Team Obama, it's really, really important that Andy and his friends get the lessons of the Bush years right, lest they repeat our same mistakes. Take it from me: we should have been more humble and willing to learn some hard-earned lessons from the Clinton Administration and from career civil servants in the Department of Education. Now it's your turn. Implementation wasn't perfect, but there's a problem with "implementation was the problem." It papers over the real structural impediments that lead to so many unintended consequences when the feds try to do good in education. All is not lost, Andy, but all is not possible from Washington, either.

* Andy insists that he and Sara want to use incentives, not mandates, to encourage states and districts to get out of the way of promising entrepreneurs. But their paper gets very fuzzy on this point. As far as I can tell, most of the new money they are proposing would go to the entrepreneurs themselves, not states or districts. Yet they also want a new Office of Education Entrepreneurship and Innovation to "deploy funding streams at its authority to provide incentives for state and local policymakers to eliminate barriers." Which funding streams? A more promising approach might be that taken by the (Bush Administration's!) Teacher Incentive Fund, which basically bribes school districts to experiment with pay-for-performance programs in return for federal largesse.

** Andy also has some fun saying that I'm "like a teenage driver with a disconcerting tendency to over-correct in every turn." He's right that I've changed my mind about NCLB. Other issues too. In each case, what's happened is that new evidence has become available, and I've updated my views accordingly. Isn't that what all responsible analysts are supposed to do?