That's what they're talking about at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Ross Douthat moderates.

We are pretty good at generating buzz for upcoming reports at Fordham (doesn't hurt that those reports are typically buzzworthy) but this article in Education Week yesterday fostered buzz without alerting me to the bite. It summarizes what I imagine to be fairly complex research findings on a topic that many folks are interested in, then doesn't tell us exactly when the actually study is to be published or released (sometime "soon"). So I rely on the journalist's take of the findings (risky but unavoidable).

Harvard researcher Tom Kane and colleagues apparently conducted a random assignment study analyzing whether students in classrooms with National Boards teachers (i.e., those that have received the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards-NBPTS-credential) learned more than students taught by comparison teachers. To my knowledge, this is the first random assignment study conducted on this contentious topic (see here, here, and here). We're told that students with teachers with high ratings on the Boards gained more than students in classes with lower-scoring Board teachers. And though test score differences between students with Board teachers and with non-applicant teachers were positive, they were not statistically significant. Kane sums it up this way:

Ineffective teachers are just as likely as effective teachers to apply for national-board certification but the board process does seem to provide some information on teachers' effectiveness, so people who are certified are a little better than the average non-applicant, and unsuccessful applicants are worse than non-applicants.

Okay, so some encouraging news for National Boards folks but not mind-blowing either. The value-added analysis, though, showed even stronger results, i.e., it better predicted which teachers were most likely to produce sizable student learning gains than did the National Board measures. Based on the study findings, researchers are calling on the NBPTS to take into account student learning gains as part of their credentialing process. Hmmm... sounds like a pretty good idea, but not one that will likely be embraced anytime soon. Mary Dilworth, NBPTS vice president, responds, "We need to spend a little more time looking actually at the assessment that we're using to gauge student performance." True, but this doesn't rule out the possibility of piloting a value-added National Boards credential in states which have sound data infrastructure, strong standards, and highly-regarded, aligned assessments. It would be a welcome contribution to our understanding of teacher quality.

I was intrigued by the article and really look forward to reading the study. I'm just not sure when that's going to happen...

The New York Times marks the midway point of Newark mayor Cory Booker's first term with a supportive editorial. Meanwhile, Booker spent yesterday evening at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark to welcome incoming superintendent (and former D.C. schools chief) Clifford Janey.

The well-seasoned Janey (he's 61) sounded the right notes. For instance:

"It makes no sense and is actually harmful to move students along and provide them with a phony diploma," he said to one burst of applause. "We will not only look at the standards but the promotion policies from elementary right through high schools."

That's a highly worthwhile undertaking. As Checker and Liam pointed out in Gadfly a few weeks ago, most states and districts struggle to maintain meaningful academic standards when lots of students can't meet them. Holding back or denying diplomas to 50 percent of your pupils is not very palatable, politically or otherwise, so typically you end up either watering down tests so more kids can pass or simply waiving the exams altogether and accepting a "portfolio of work," or some such empty alternative instead. The result of which, of course, is that graduating or moving on to the next grade in no way signifies that a student has reached a certain level of skill or proficiency.

The problem for Newark, though, is that Janey promised the same thing in D.C., and his plan never blossomed. In 2004, Gadfly reported that the incoming supe was keen on implementing high school graduation exams and "replacing the city's lax academic standards with fine models from Massachusetts or California." He never did either.

Maybe it's not entirely his fault; life as a big-city superintendent is precarious, particularly when one is pushed into the ring without a powerful mayor in his corner--a luxury that Janey's successor, Michelle Rhee, enjoys with Mayor Fenty. But the situation doesn't favor him much more in Newark, where the schools are run from the more-of-the-same state capital instead of by the everything-must-change Booker. One wants to believe Janey will deliver on his promises, but it's hard to imagine he'll be able to follow up a tepid tenure in troubled D.C. with a revelatory reign in shattered Newark.

KIPP schools mostly serve the middle grades and thus spend much of their time plugging the gaps in knowledge and skills that students picked up early on in traditional public schools. But imagine if the youngsters entering KIPP middle schools came from KIPP elementary schools . The mind reels at the possibilities.

The National Council of La Raza is headquartered one block from our office. Despite what their spokesmen may or may not tell you, "La Raza" means "The Race," and it's a term that has gained an impressive toehold in some k-12 public schools as "Raza studies." (It's on college campuses, too, of course. One can earn a B.A. in Raza Studies from the University of San Francisco, for example, and then graduate fully prepared for a life of grievance and groaning.) Here's an article detailing the Raza nonsense peddled in some Tucson, Arizona, high schools. If you're into this type of thing, perhaps in order is??a junket to the 10th Annual Institute for Transformative Education seminar, sponsored by the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican-American/Raza Studies Department and the University of Arizona College of Education.

Classroom teachers will have the opportunity to learn from and work with the leading scholars in the areas of Latino critical race theory, critical race theory, critical multicultural education, Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and critical race pedagogy.

It's incredible, really.

An attack weathered by all education-policy pundits who have not??taught in dreadful, moldy,??urban schools where classes are dismissed to the sound of gunfire is this: "Ah ha! But you haven't spent time in the classroom and therefore have no grounds for opining." How silly, though, if our legislators, staring at their 18.5 percent approval ratings, took to CSPAN and said, "Foolish Americans. You have no idea how difficult it is to serve one's country! The vast majority of you have never been politicians, and probably you couldn't even legislate new flags for your??respective city halls. So, shush up."????

That's not the same thing, Liam! Oh, isn't it?

Iowa debates whether to disallow the use of chokeholds in public schools. (Wikipedia provides a handy list of common chokeholds, including the anaconda choke and gogoplata.)

Clearly, it's struck a chord and it's worth unpacking: Why do so many teachers lean so heavily, when criticized, on the "you've never yourself been a teacher" argument? As I noted here, it's logically baseless. Imagine lawyers, doctors, oil-company executives mounting such a defense. If one may judge the performance of only those whose occupations he at one time or another shared, then he is prohibited from judging the performance of almost everyone--the lazy sales associate ["Barista," I mean]??at Starbucks, for example, or??the incompetent dentist who leaves his??patient's??mouth feeling as if it were invaded by those particularly nasty African bees.

But perhaps the??one in question has, in fact, worked as a waiter. And so he feels assured that his critique of the poor service he received at dinner last night is quite within bounds. Alas, no. He is mistaken, you see, because the restaurant at which he once delivered entrees to customers cannot be considered very busy, whereas the restaurant at which he dined last night certainly is. (The restaurant analogy is here used to demonstrate the further silliness of teachers who trumpet their work in urban schools, as opposed to the cushy schools across town.)

I'm familiar with no other profession that so often trots out this crutch. I was just discussing with others in the office why teachers, in particular, pledge such allegiance to this martyr mantra. And no, it's not because teaching is a tough, unrewarding job--rarely have I heard gentlemen who ride on the backs of??garbage trucks, when upbraided for not collecting the refuse, respond, "Well, you haven't ever been a sanitation worker, now have you?"

Furthermore, the teachers who evoke this lame excuse are typically lightyears behind the??wonks they vilify in realizing what actually works for public schools. We already know, for instance, that carrying on about the disadvantages that plague one's pupils is a bridge to nowhere. The high-school teacher is upset that his students didn't receive a solid middle-school education, the middle-school teacher upbraids his elementary-school counterparts for the same, the elementary-school teacher wonders why his students didn't go to pre-K, the pre-K teacher complains about his students' lack of nutrition... and so it goes, all the way back until we reach the moment of conception and realize that the world is just an unequal place.

Lots of teachers have realized that. Lots of schools enroll kids with every disadvantage under the sun and still manage to teach them well (see the Education Trust website for a comprehensive list). Those teachers that make excuses, that complain that their critics have never taught in an urban classroom, do not live on the moral mountaintop they think they do, nor are their??apologias needed in any school--urban or otherwise.

At first glance, this New York Times article on Brooklyn's Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice looks to be another feel-good story about the small schools initiative. It mentions the usual statistics--93 percent of seniors graduated, most are going to college, etc--but then the article takes a moment to focus on the dedicated teachers who make it all possible. As in many high-performing charter schools, this specific small school has a young principal (Elana Karopkin, 32). For four years she's led the school and produced what on the surface appear to be positive results. But, Ms. Karopkin is leaving her school to become an assistant superintendent at Achievement First. Here's what she has to say about the move:

Ms. Karopkin said it would be unfair to say she was burned out, but admitted she was nothing less than "exhausted," both physically and emotionally. "You are taking a bunch of hyper, type A perfectionist people and giving them a herculean task," she said. "People have to work much too hard to do what we are doing. People cannot work at this level all their lives and nobody is prepared to do something at a level of mediocrity."

I'm not sure that Achievement First will be much different (although perhaps in an oversight role the pressure subsides a smidge), but that's beside the point. Ms. Karopkin's comments are a rare, frank look at what happens when the raw enthusiasm of a twenty-something out to change the world collides with reality. Yes, these greenhorns enter these schools (be them small, charter, urban, etc.) with open minds and full hearts, but they're also incredibly driven and perfectionists (per Ms. Karopkin). Within Teach For America, "corps members have an average GPA of 3.6 and 95 percent held leadership positions on their college campuses." Based on their performance, I'd hazard a guess that the majority of these young reformers are not accustomed to failure.?? And when they see failure--students failing classes, dropping out of school, ending up on the streets--that is completely out of their control, it saps their will to continue the Sisyphean task of pushing kids to better and brighter futures. Therefore, the ultimate question is: how can schools capture the energy of these young teachers and funnel it such that it sustains for a longer period of time?

Could it be with more money? Smaller class sizes? Tempered expectations? A more gradual introduction to the problems of an urban classroom? For his part, chancellor Joel Klein said

"When people are part of the world of changing things for children, they don't view it is as work," he said, pointing to members of his own staff who log 14-hour days.

Perhaps Klein's crew doesn't view their work as such, but I'm not sure many of them spend time in the classroom. For the teachers that do, whether they view it as "work" or not, they require the means to maintain their sanity. If both innovative school districts and charter schools can't figure out how to meet these needs, we'll continue to lose our most talented reformers in the trenches.

The conversion of seven Catholic schools in Washington, D.C., to charter schools is off to a rough start, as the Washington Post reports today that the city's budget failed to provide funding for these schools, and they won't get their first payments in July.

Robert Crane, of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, is quoted saying "I told [D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C.] Gray's people repeatedly that the kids were going to show up in the public schools one way or the other," and Public Charter School Board chair Tom Nida gets right to the point, that "this couldn't have been to anyone's surprise."

No, anyone reading the Post , or better yet, Flypaper and Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools ? would have seen this conversion coming from a mile away. Fortunately, the schools plan to open using loans and philanthropy. I just hope the District catches up soon.