Mike Antonucci tracks the latest media wave, about teachers who don't teach.

Former presidential aspirant Fred Thompson has a piece on conservatism in the Wall Street Journal today that's getting lots of attention. He argues that "smaller government will always appeal." On education, he writes:

An education system cannot overcome the breakdown of the family, and the social fabric that surrounds children daily.

This is the way to "revive the conservative cause"? Through Charles Murray-style defeatism? Of course parents are a child's first and most important teachers. Of course we're never going to eradicate our social ills until we stem the decline of the family. Still, there are three big problems with Thompson's statement.

First, we aren't, by and large, even trying to use our education system to overcome family breakdown. In the inner-city, where such meltdowns are most acute, typical public schools remain awful and resistant to reform. If we had excellent public schools (or lots of urban kids in excellent charter or voucher schools) and they still couldn't overcome the challenges of family dysfunction, then this statement could be plausible. But we're light years away from that.

Second, the excellent schools that are getting amazing results and preparing their students for college and for success in American society reject this notion out of hand. The KIPPs and the Amistads and the Cristo Reys take in loco parentis to an extreme, intervening in all corners of their students' lives if that's what it takes. We need inner-city schools to be more paternalistic, not less.

Third, the argument that families must "do their part" can and should be decoupled from excuse-making about what the "education system cannot" do. The most prominent public figure making the case for parents to be responsible, turn off the television, and get their kids to do their homework is, of course, Barack Obama. And he's doing it without implying that our schools are off the hook until families get their act together.

While No Child Left Behind may not have been in line with conservative principles (or, in many respects, common sense), the antidote is not giving up on schools entirely. We spend over $500 billion on our k-12 education system. A true conservative would expect something in return for that investment.

Mike makes good points about Thompson's article. But modesty about the lengths to which the KIPP/Amistad/SEED models can be stretched is warranted. District public schools should copy many of the "no excuses" methods at work in high-achieving charter schools, but KIPP and its ilk have luxuries that district schools do not; for example, they can easily expel students who don't subscribe to their academically demanding, disciplined philosophies.

And let us not get carried away with the paternalism idea. Mike writes:

The KIPPs and the Amistads and the Cristo Reys take in loco parentis to an extreme, intervening in all corners of their students' lives if that's what it takes. We need inner-city schools to be more paternalistic, not less.

This type of??talk should, and will, make lots of people uncomfortable.

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I'm encouraged this morning reading this article about Idaho's work in crafting standardized performance evaluations for teachers. Apparently, some are hoping it paves the way for pay-for-performance plans for teachers (another good thing).

To be sure, recent reports indicate that teacher evaluations are pretty poor on the whole. I've had the opportunity over the years to take a look at some of these evaluations, particularly those in urban school districts, and concur that they can be pretty embarrassing, often treating "personal hygiene" on the same plane as "teacher knowledge of subject"--that is, if the latter is even included.

To be fair, there are some fantastic evaluation instruments out there for assessing teachers' skills and knowledge. The Teacher Advancement Program, for instance, has one they use as part of their professional development and performance-based pay program. It's a research-based rubric that includes nearly 20 indicators (such as teacher content knowledge, teacher knowledge of students, academic feedback, and use of problem solving skills)--each one with corresponding benchmarks that operationalize what it means to be exemplary, proficient, or needing improvement. Let's hope the potato state can be a model for other states/districts interested in overhauling their teacher evaluations so that they actually serve to help teachers serve students.

At a news conference yesterday, New York City teachers union boss Randi Weingarten called Joel Klein's protestations over Albany's inflexibility on school funding the "height of chutzpah."

Beautiful. It's alliterative (more or less, depending on how you pronounce the Yiddish/Hebrew "ch"), elegantly cadenced, and well-suited to its demographic context. That's how you do a sound bite.

The newest Gadfly is out. In it, Checker and I write about how states, loath to see their dropout rates rise, are backtracking on high school exit exams. It's easy to understand why: At a superficial level, reducing the number of dropouts and ensuring that all students leave high school with advanced skills are contradictory goals. Gadfly also contains this week reviews of reports about career and technical education, how Islam is portrayed in textbooks, and state standards.

From The Economist: Mexico is making moves to fix its broken educational system (a system that affects the U.S.??in obvious ways). One wonders, though, whether Mexico's union boss (see here and here) is really willing to give up any power over teacher-staffing decisions.

The New York Times reports today that Senator John McCain is set to meet with three contenders for the VP slot on his ticket: former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney; Florida Governor Charlie Crist, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

It stands to reason that the vice president in a potential McCain administration would be handed a major role on education policy; after all, McCain himself hasn't shown much interest in the issue in his career or campaign, though that's starting to change a bit. (His education secretary would also have a lot of leeway, or so I argued here.)

So how do these three stack up on the edu-front? Mitt Romney hails from the state with the highest test scores in the country; though he didn't spark the "Massachusetts Miracle," he didn't mess it up, either. And unlike McCain, he did talk a lot about education on the campaign trail, generally in a smart, data-savvy sort of way. It's easy to imagine a Vice President Romney kick-starting Vice President Al Gore's old "reinventing government" work--and applying it thoughtfully to education.

Charlie Crist is another story. He inherited perhaps the fastest-improving state education system in the country; Florida's recent progress for poor and Hispanic children is monumental. But rather than defend the hard-fought gains of his predecessor, Jeb Bush, he seems intent on retreating. He cleared most of Bush's top education advisors out of Tallahassee and has shown an openness to watering down the state's education accountability system. But he's a savvy and popular politician and has been pushing poll-tested policies that play well with the public.

And then there's Jindal. He's still a relative newcomer but, as has been the case throughout his prolific but short career, isn't wasting any time making his mark. He's pushing a school voucher program targeted to poor New Orleans students through his state's legislature; this one has a real shot at becoming law.

Let's be frank: McCain isn't going to make this decision based on education policy (ha!) but on politics. The Wall Street base loves Romney; Jindal excites much of the GOP coalition; Crist buys McCain a win in Florida. But at least it's worth noting that two of the three could plausibly claim the title, "The Education Vice President."

We've written before about Governor Bobby Jindal. There's lots to like. And then there's this (from the New York Times): Jindal campaigned in Louisiana as a social conservative, which meant "favoring teaching 'intelligent design' in schools as an alternative to evolution."