Is Obama’s college goal as unattainable as NCLB’s 100 percent proficiency?

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a chart I have been waiting to see: how many more degrees would have to be given out to reach Obama’s college completion goal by 2020. The data come from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. Let’s see: California would need to increase degree attainment by 5.2 percent a year, starting now. Meantime, state higher ed funding there is being slashed, enrollments are being cut, and fees are being raised. I spent years as a math major but don’t need to multivariable calculus or abstract algebra to tell you that this does not compute. What kinds of innovation can bridge this gap, and are any being proposed (or, better, pursued)? Discuss.

Story idea: Where detention is not an option.

You can’t send a 21-year-old to the principal’s office. You might not even be able to convince people that behavior problems plague a college class. These are grown-ups who want to be there—right?

I have always wondered if the discipline issues I see in high school classrooms—not the quiet stuff like cheating but the outwardly disruptive behaviors that prevent an instructor from getting a lesson across—magically go away once students are at university. A letter to Community College Dean, who blogs for Inside Higher Ed, suggests they don’t. Behavior problems in college courses, and whether professors get or seek any help solving them, would be an interesting topic for journalists to look into.

See ya, Sally.

Word on the street—15th Street, that is—is that Sally Quinn’s column has been dumped. I thought nothing could top the don’t-wear-red-and-green-to-Shabbat-dinner tutorial, until I read this, which was all sorts of awful. Given that my voracity for her family’s gossip is topped only by my disdain that the Washington Post would hire her to write about it, I am glad to hear that the paper is returning to its regularly scheduled journalism.

Prepare to define: “college-ready”

The phrase of the moment! You know you should hyphenate it—but you, and the policymakers you love, are probably less clear on how to define it. You could make up your own definition, as this school system did (complete with jazzy videos), or you could look beyond courses taken and test scores to a more complex definition. I like this report by the Center for Educational Policy Research as a starting point. They have turned to research and theory to craft a definition that includes cognitive strategies, content knowledge and behavioral attributes. 

Measuring those attributes? Another story. Improving them? Yeah. The report says that “although measures exist currently or are in the process of being developed to generate high-quality information in all of the component areas of the definition, no system exists or is being developed to integrate the information and, more importantly, shape high school preparation programs so that they do a better, more intentional job of fostering student capabilities in all these areas.”

David Conley at the University of Oregon, who wrote the report, might be a good source as you look into this new framing of an old issue. And you might stop in at an Education Sector event I am moderating on March 11, where Chad Aldeman will discuss his recent report on data systems that might help us better figure out who is graduating high school ready for college, who is not, and why.

Have you read ALL the RtTT applications?

Or do you know someone who has? Several reporters have asked me to recommend experts who are familiar with each state’s proposal and can common on the whole, unabridged bunch. I think they want the horse race handicapped. I’m at a loss. Suggestions?

AYKM?

Do we really need another acronym to describe children who are not native English speakers?

While I am all about precision of language, I am also known for being particularly resistant to renaming things. I like to call things what people call them in real life. In Not Much Just Chillin’ I called a home ec teacher a “home ec teacher” and got angry letters from teachers mad I didn’t say “family and consumer science teacher.” Ditto when I called a media specialist in Tested the “librarian.” It takes nothing away from their professionalism to say that while the job description expands, the name can remain the same.

When I started out as an education writer, we had ESOL students: English for speakers of other languages. Or ESL students: English as a second language. Then came ELL: English language learners. I am fine with any of those, though I know they are not perfect. (English might be their third language!) In government use you see most often LEP, limited English proficient.

The other day I was corresponding with a teacher friend who mentioned FLNEs. This sounded like a Latin American terrorist group, but no, it stands for “first language not English.” Which is just a nitpicky way of saying “English as a second language,” isn’t it? She also handed me SLAH: “second language at home.”

Of course we need all these words because you could be FLNE but not ELL, because you have demonstrated mastery of English, though maybe in that case you are still ELL (because who ever stops learning?) but not LEP anymore, and let’s just put out there that if your family does not speak English you are a SLAH but if you were adopted from another country while your family here speaks English you are not SLAH but rather FLNE and aaaaaargh.

I really do not see the point.

Merit pay. (Again.)

In my eyes, we should pay better teachers more because it’s right. But that is not why merit pay is being written into policy. Ostensibly, the idea is that tying pay to student scores will make teachers and teaching improve. What we need to talk about is: how, exactly?

If you believe that teachers do not perform as well as they could because they lack the proper incentives, then this policy shift makes sense. But my years spent observing classrooms tells me that that ineffectiveness has as much to do with ability as with motivation. An awful lot of teachers simply do not know how to teach more effectively than they do now. It is not like they have these reserves of greatness they are withholding from children simply because they don’t have good enough reason to share it.

I would love to see far more reporting, as we enter the new world of merit pay, that plumbs teachers’ points of view. Not just a passing quote, but get into people’s classrooms and brains a bit, challenge them, get a sense of what kind of impact performance pay might have, or might not.

And there is no better time than now to address potential impracticalities, so they can be addressed during implementation. For example: In the Houston Chronicle this weekend, Joel Klein called value-added “a leveling of the playing field that allows us to isolate teacher impact.” In the high-poverty schools you cover, how much of a child’s reading instruction comes from one teacher? Where the student is taught by only one teacher all day, it is easier to isolate his or her impact. But what about the children I spent a year with at Tyler Heights Elementary in Annapolis? Every day, the students were shuffled into Title I-funded interventions that meant that two-thirds of the children in Ms. Johnson’s third grade classroom spent at least half of their reading time away from her. And that doesn’t count the afterschool tutoring most of them were in every day, which she didn’t teach. But for paperwork’s sake, she was their teacher, and in a value-added system their improvement or lack thereof would be attributed to her.

Or would it?

Journalists in districts that have been using performance pay for some time owe it to everyone to go far more in-depth on the topic, from the classroom, so as new plans are put in place all relevant considerations are on the table. Is there any great journalism on the topic I might be missing?

Higher ed story ideas.

Scott Jaschik from Inside Higher Ed always gives a talk at EWA’s higher ed seminar about the Top Ten college story ideas, and it is always, always worth the price of admission—not that our conferences really have a price of admission. My colleague Lori Crouch is twittering them more in depth here, but in short: the unfairness of community college funding, budget woes of small privates (check out the rising discount rates, dwindling rainy-day funds), the gender gap (is it reversing course?), unemployed PhDs, the demise of humanities, how merit scholarships only benefit the affluent and colleges eager to enroll them, outsourcing curriculum-in-a-box to for-profits, mammoth deficits in college athletics, where veterans are going on the GI Bill and tougher admissions at regional publics.

And because he couldn’t stop at ten: allergies, community-college-to-private transfers, gay students at religious colleges and what the iPad might mean for e-textbooks.

“Everybody’s doing it”?

Three times in the last few weeks I have seen newspaper pieces include statements like, “Chris estimated that more than half his classmates used Adderal during the ACT” or “Sarah said that 90 percent of the students at her school drink on weekends.” Oh, really? Did Sarah hire Harris Interactive to survey a representative sample?

We can illuminate that substance abuse—or cheating, or stealing, or whatever—is a widespread problem without resorting to unverified guesses passed off as fact. Specific, personal examples can be just as powerful and have the added advantage of being accurate: “Chris said he was introduced to Adderal by a good friend, who got it from a soccer teammate, who got it from his girlfriend. Heading into the ACT, he shared his Adderal with three classmates.” Etc.

“Do less with more.”

You know that when Mike Petrilli and I talked about the future of education journalism on this Education Next podcast, I meant to say “do more with less,” right?

P.S. My hair looked much better on CNN. And about that bulky sweater: I should have known better.

Whatever happened to the four assurances?

Has your state done anything lately to assure the equitable distribution of teachers? I didn’t think so. John Fensterwald looks at how the ball’s been dropped so far in California. You might ask the same questions where you live.

Hess in the house.

Katy bar the door: Rick Hess is blogging! Rick is skeptical of fads (no matter which “side” they emerge from), well-informed and sometimes very right. Like, how can I not be excited to hear him articulate this?:

“For what it’s worth, I find K-12 schooling to be one of the few places in life where we suffer a shortage of cynics and skeptics. The cost is a dearth of observers willing to deliver some bitter medicine to a sector gorged on saccharine sentiment.”

Did you catch me on CNN?

One of the perils of working from home is that when a CNN producer asks you to come on air in two hours, chances are that your hair, not to mention your eyebrows, will be a hot mess. But hey, I welcome any chance to inject my form of reality into the education conversation.

The topic was merit pay, and the producer almost uninvited me when she learned during the pre-interview that I am not a full-on hater. I knew enough about Steve Perry, CNN’s education expert, to guess he’d be unequivocally PRO merit pay and I knew enough about cable news to figure they wanted me as the ANTI. I wonder if she read the headline on this op-ed but not the second sentence, where I say, “Teachers ought to be subject to some form of merit pay; it has always seemed silly to me that they are compensated mainly for the number of years they stick around.” I had already told my parents I was about to be on TV and had changed my clothes, so I explained to the producer what would be some differences between our points of view. Because if you don’t have sharp differences, you don’t have cable news.

So I went to the studio, and after the makeup artist penciled a half-inch onto the ends of my eyebrows, I sat down in front of the camera and prepared to be talked over. I thought CNN did a good job in a short time presenting contradictory research and suggesting there might be some subtleties involved, but I cannot say the same for Steve Perry. The teaser for the segment suggested Perry thought kids were unprepared for college because there is not ... merit pay. WOW. Awesome rhetoric! Right up there with Perry’s use of the word “communist”! I would have to see the clip to remember what exactly I said, and I know better than to watch myself on TV. The main thing I remember is that Perry—a get-tough principal who CNN put on (paid, I believe) retainer as their education expert after getting great response to a piece they ran on him—actually suggested that schools had been paying teachers based on touchy-feely measures.

DUDE, YOU WORK IN A SCHOOL. YOU KNOW THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS. He also conflated merit pay with incentive pay to work in hard-to-staff areas. Of course, I had no way to correct him on air. Because, as my mother IM’d me, I “looked gorgeous and upset, but those [bleep]holes never let you talk.”

Figuring out the skating standstill.

Sometimes turnaround guru Justin Cohen and I are simply on the same wavelength. The same time he was writing this, I was having an e-mail conversation with a friend about the lack of progress in figure skating. The topic was areas that have failed to innovate over time, and my mind immediately went to figure skating. I know that the skaters are doing, say, four turns in jumps where they used to do three, and maybe they leap higher or spin faster, but structurally and aesthetically, to the untrained eye the routines look pretty much the same as they did decades ago. Yes, that Chinese couple was great, but it still feels like what Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner did back when I was really into this stuff. Same with the singles competitions: better executed, but the same types of moves, the exact same vibe.

Recalling—and lamenting—that Scott Hamilton could never do his backflip in competition, I figured (haha) that scoring rules must have something to do with why skating hasn’t leaped (hahaha) forward, and Justin did too. Of course he is the one wonky enough to tie it to education policy. I was just thinking about skating.

“Publicly funded”? For the most part.

I saw a story the other day—kills me that I can’t remember where—that described charter schools as funded by a combination of public and private funds. That’s often the truth, isn’t it, at least among the high-performing charters people want to replicate? Yet they are almost never described that way in the press; the shorthand description is usually that charters are “public schools that operate with public funds free from many of the strictures of the school district,” or something like that. I do not think anybody keeps track of how much private capital flows to charters (for operating costs, for buildings, for whatever). It is important to mention private funds, where they are relevant—for instance, in discussions about encouraging more charters and replicating the good ones. There are sustainability questions when any venture relies in part on philanthropy; obviously this is an issue other sectors (ahem: journalism, nonprofits) grapple with too. At any rate, I think implying charters are solely publicly funded may at times mask complexity.

Because we TOTALLY solved the high school problem...

Once all students graduate high school able to enter college without needing remedial classes, then we can talk about getting rid of senior year. But I missed the part where we educated students so well that they couldn’t possibly benefit from a fourth year of high school. If senior year is a waste of time, wouldn’t the right answer be making it better, rather than trying to save money by canning it?

Anyone reporting on such proposals should make sure to give some data on the college-readiness of students in their states—the percent of freshmen in public colleges enrolled in remedial classes, for example.

Sis! Boom! Bah! Humbug.

Just so you know where I am coming from: I grew up playing and watching lots of sports, and will never forget the lineup of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, but in my adulthood I have grown ambivalent if not a bit hostile to the attention and money Americans expend on professional and pseudo-professional (i.e. college) athletics. I enjoy going to games and seeing the action, but I no longer understand—perhaps because I married someone who feels this way, so much so he wears a t-shirt proclaiming his indifference—following a team as if you have anything to do with it.

Having gone to a college where students only realize there is a football team because games happen to be played within view of the armchairs in the library, college sports mania puzzles me especially. Friends who taught college have been pressured to go easy on athletes, and the fakery that sports-crazed universities engage in to pretend that athletics somehow serves academics, and that marquee athletes are truly scholars, riles me. I was glad to hear Secretary Duncan call out the NCAA, I think it is great when publications like the Ann Arbor News look at what athletes are doing academically (you ever check the breakdown of majors of the basketball and football players you cover?), the tournament brackets by graduation rate always amuse me, and I love USA Today’s investigative work on athletic spending.

So I would like to see journalists take a different sort of look at Signing Day, beyond the usual yee-haw coverage. When my colleague Kent Fischer was blogging in Dallas, he used to ask, “How many of these kids will truly leverage their talents into a college education? (Because only a handful of them will ever earn a paycheck chasing a ball.)” That’s easy enough to find out, isn’t it? Take the pool of athletes your publication featured on Signing Day six years ago. See how many of them got a degree. Sorry about the buzzkill, but don’t you want to know?

Why Texas schoolkids don’t read “Brown Bear, Brown Bear.”

This week’s New York Times Magazine has an enlightening piece by Russell Shorto about the frighteningly political process for curriculum adoption in Texas—which has ripples throughout the country, because as the Lone Star State goes, so go textbook publishers everywhere. The Language Police by Diane Ravitch is another must-read on the topic, though she focuses mostly on the mishmash of political correctness that has influenced the process. I don’t understand why public conversation about religion in schools often conflates teaching about religion’s place in culture and history with allowing religion to determine what children learn and don’t learn.

“Hope or Hype in Harlem?”

Knowing nothing but the zillion things I have read, and setting aside that the charter schools themselves are somewhat of a mystery to me, I think the Harlem Children’s Zone is all sorts of awesome. But I have always thought it intriguing how Geoffrey Canada managed to receive so much support (money, praise, etc.) from the type of people who usually insist on seeing results before they proclaim something a success. This has been probably the most written-about single endeavor for children in decades, yet we had not seen a truly thorough look into the two key questions that should be asked about HCZ: Does it work, and can it be copied?

Too early to draw firm conclusions, but now we at least have a start. Helen Zelon at CityLimits.org has reported and written a thorough and very interesting piece about Canada and the Zone, focusing on those two questions. To the first, there is no conclusive answer—Canada himself says they have such a long time horizon for judging success, decades, because the arc of the effort runs from infancy to college. Then why, as Zelon points out, does the HCZ not track students who left the program’s charter schools for public high schools outside the Zone, because the charter part of the pipeline was ending? “We don’t evaluate them in the sense we evaluate our own kids,” an official said. What a mistake. Isn’t the point of the pipeline that they are your “own kids” till they go to college, and wouldn’t you track them even beyond, if you are as results-oriented as you say?

The article leaves me with other questions. Zelon writes, “According to Canada’s tipping point theory, once Harlem reaches a 65 percent level of success—academic, economic, social and health—future success and academic achievement will be the natural outcome.” But 65 percent of what? Academic, okay: 65 percent of students scoring proficient on tests. Economic: 65 percent of people with jobs? Living above the poverty level? Health and social: 65 percent of people having healthy teeth? Managing their asthma? Living with a mother and father? It is bizarre for Canada to talk frequently about a metric that is completely undefined.

I remember Zelon asking me, a year ago, who was criticizing Canada and the HCZ. Really, nobody. I know the organization can make it difficult, if not impossible, for reporters to visit their schools if it is not obvious they are coming to write a puff piece. Like I said, I love lots of what they are doing. But a project that the president wants to replicate around the country should be open to analysis—and not just their own.

I am glad Zelon took the first big step. However: PAYWALL! Bits of the project are posted for free; far more, including interesting graphs on the Zone schools’ population and achievement, you gotta pay for. The piece is superlative and important and the kind of thing that makes me question my reflexive stance on piracy. I mean, I wouldn’t cry if someone put this online where everyone could see it. In lieu of that, just pay the $4.95.

The abstinence artifice.

I am late to weigh in on the abstinence sex ed study that received so much coverage last week. Without hashing it out in detail, I will say only this: Have you ever visited a sex ed class? If you are an education reporter, you really should. Having sat through many of these classes in two years immersed in middle schools, it always struck me that advocates sneakily and successfully set up a false debate, which sounded something like this: Either you are teaching children to abstain till marriage, or you are teaching them how to perform oral sex. I have never visited an abstinence-only class, but you wouldn’t know it from the way almost any teacher talks. They carefully avoid moral questions (“I can’t answer that; ask your parents,” again and again) and always, always suggest that not having sex is the very best way to avoid any of the complications they warn you about.

My favorite part of sex ed is when the teacher reads the questions slipped into the secret box. It might be my favorite scene in Not Much Just Chillin’. Page 238, or go on Amazon and search inside the book for “estrogen.” Or “PMS.” Or “roller coaster.”

Charters: open to whom?

A new study from the Civil Rights Project has gotten people talking—or should I say snickering? At National Journal, the analysts pile on, criticizing (fairly so) that the report’s main point is a heaping helping of No Duh: Schools designed as alternatives for children in overwhelmingly minority areas have student populations that are—get this!—overwhelmingly minority. How much you care depends, as Mass Insight’s Justin Cohen points out, on what you see as a more important end: better student outcomes or integration.

I think integration is a worthy goal in and of itself. But the resegregation the Civil Rights Project has for years been so effective in illuminating is a problem more than anything because minority children have been isolated in bad schools. Is it a problem if a good school is all-black or all-Hispanic? Interesting question—but not what concerns me the most about charter populations. I am more concerned about how many of the best charters have disproportionately low numbers of special education students and English language learners. This has been analyzed a small bit but not much, and it is not enough to say this happens; journalists need to figure out to what degree, why and so what?

Are parents of special needs children not choosing charters because they don’t offer the kind of services traditional schools do? Do charters have any incentive to take special needs students, or create the proper environment for them? Are charters—subtly or overtly—keeping these students from enrolling? What does that mean for direct comparisons of student achievement? Where charters are doing a good job, is it right for them to be off-limits, de facto or otherwise, to students who might need help the most?

On the flip side, some charters focus on special education students but only serve the mildly disabled, taking in a standard per-student subsidy far beyond what they spend in services. These are not easy stories to report, but don’t let that stop you.

Mess-free art: a non-school trend story.

I introduced Milo to coloring, thinking it would be a great activity for him to do independently while I cooked or cleaned or otherwise paid him no mind. Of course it didn’t work out that way, because while he (literally) loves crayons to bits—and don’t get me started with his unhealthy obsession with BATH CRAYONS—he sees coloring as a team sport. “Draw blue bawoon!” “Draw M!” “Draw green car!” I draw something, he bids bye-bye and scribbles over it, and it all starts over again.

In search of a new trick, I went looking for coloring books. Ha. Three CVS’s, two Targets, two bookstores and three yuppie toy stores—but no plain old coloring books. What’s taken their place is an entire genre of art products whose prime directive is to leave no trace. A Magic Light Brush that only leaves color on special Color Wonder paper. Paper that allows for a glittery result without actual glitter. “No need for messy glue,” the ads trumpet. Is glue so awful? The idea of fingerpaints that are clear until they touch the paper almost makes me cry.

One other genre of art supplies is mucking up the crafts aisle these days: those requiring batteries. The desperate vibe these products give off reminds me of the constant promotions from the big pizza chains: Now we will put cheese in our crust! Now we will segment the cheesy crust into bits you can pull apart, because cheesy crust on its own was not exciting enough!

If you are one of those education reporters who covers families and kids as well, PLEASE OH PLEASE write a trend story about this supposed advance in coloring technology. And not in a way that makes it sound like a good thing.

As for us, at a sad, empty suburban Toys R Us just before the snow fell, my husband eventually spotted the holy grail: a 400-page Mickey Mouse coloring book. No learning activities, no invisible ink. I bought a pack of washable crayons to go with it—I may be a Luddite, but I am not crazy.

Early childhood education: Dumb product division.

Does anybody ever read a press release? Is that even a remotely effective way to get your message out to journalists? Do PR people think about whether the recipients of their releases would really, truly be interested in them? Did the person who sent me a release about this have any idea I would only publicize it in order to mock it? (Oh, any press is good press, I know.)

The one lesson I have learned from new motherhood is that 65 percent of the products you think you need are absolutely dispensable, if not totally worthless. From now on I plan to give my newly expecting friends one of those Must Buy Baby checklists, relentlessly annotated: Borrow, Borrow, Don’t Need, Don’t Need, Borrow, See if You Need it Later and Then Borrow, Don’t Need, and so on. A prenatal iPod waistband would go into the Please Don’t Tell Me You Just Bought That category. When you are eight months pregnant, do you really need your belly to be even wider? Can’t you just turn the stereo on?

Here at Educated Reporter we are big on the misuse of research, so the website’s implication (backed with many quotes from experts that may or may not have anything to do with this product) that not buying the Lullabelly shortchanges your child’s education—which “begins in the womb”!—was disturbing. Yes, the young brain is plastic. Yes, music is great. But that doesn’t mean an MP3 player strapped to your stomach is going to make your kid smarter. Take the fifty bucks you’ll save from not buying a polka-dotted band of fabric with a speaker embedded in it and buy a stack of great books instead.

The powerful unions.

An interesting point made in a letter to Romenesko by writer David Macaray: Why do journalists so often preface “teachers union” with the word “powerful”? Whether or not they are powerful, we don’t use that formulation with other institutions that clearly are.

And you mean what?

There is so much rhetorical sloppiness swirling around NCLB right now, it is impossible to know what anyone is talking about. Duncan complains that the current law is too prescriptive, but comments indicate new approaches that are even moreso. He calls 100 percent proficiency a utopian goal but wants to replace it with what he says is a higher bar: career and college readiness. How to judge that students are college-ready if not by giving them a test and seeing if 100 percent pass it? You’re awarded money if you make progress, and money if you’re failing. Joanne Jacobs sums some of it up.

What I take out of all the pieces written in the last week is that—aside from a growth model, which we all knew was coming—we really have no idea what the administration wants exactly. Not sure if this is the fault of the administration (for not being sure, or clear), other insiders (for not passing on clearly what they have learned), journalists, or all of the above.

Snowed in.

We all have this feeling there are more snow days than there were in the past, and I would love somebody to analyze whether this is true, for their school system at least. And then let’s figure out why. 

Let’s assume snow (and rain and fog and sleet) days have become more frequent over the last couple of decades but bad weather has not. Today a friend and I puzzled over possible reasons: liability concerns, more precise weather forecasting, decreased tolerance for risk? I know this sounds annoyingly a-mile-uphill-both-ways, but when you were a kid, weren’t snow days a rare, precious thing? I grew up in Wisconsin and I’m thinking weather forced closings maybe once every year or two. And it snowed. Man, it snowed. People say that one reason we can’t have school when it snows is because the sidewalks aren’t passable, but we didn’t even have sidewalks. We stuck our feet in plastic baggies, and then our moon boots, and tromped across four-foot snowbanks alongside the road. In large school districts, the microclimate of the worst-weather neighborhood usually forces closings for the whole county, because we can’t expect teachers to drive from one corner to the other, and how could we possibly manage the logistics of a partial closing anyway?

Just so you know where I am coming from: I have an attitude toward risk avoidance that some might call callous and irresponsible (I prefer to think of it as “sensible”). It does not err on the side of caution, though I am hardly reckless, and I don’t believe that, generally speaking, “If it just saves one person” is the right calculation with which to make public policy. I shovel out, then drive, slowly, in the snow. Unless of course I am feeling lazy, in which case I make a cup of cocoa and just pretend I couldn’t get anywhere even if I wanted to.

Which I think might be the rub, at least here in the D.C. area. We don’t want to do what is necessary of a place that has snow. I wrote about this once, calling Buffalo and Milwaukee in addition to local officials. The snow-to-snow-day ratio differs so much in Wisconsin and Washington because Wisconsin school districts behave like places that snow—they spend money on sufficient snow-removal equipment, use it and expect children to get to school—and the ones here don’t. Then, every single year, it snows, we act surprised, and children spend another day not learning. 

How much will NCLB look like RtTT?

My item on Slate’s Double X blog yesterday:

Yesterday’s New York Times piece suggested that the adminstration might revisit the way what’s called Title 1 money is allocated under No Child Left Behind. If you’ve seen how those funds are currently distributed, and sometimes squandered, you know this is a good idea in principle. But I am uneasy about what the Obama administration might substitute for the status quo.

First, the problem. Here is a typical scene in the exhibit hall at a principals’ convention. The vendor, selling some sort of educational (or “educational”) material, asks an approaching administrator, “Are you a Title I school?” If told yes, cartoon dollar signs flash in his eyeballs. As part of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Title I schools—so designated because they have a certain share of students living in poverty—get lots of extra money. I once watched teachers at a Title I school urgently page through catalogs the day of the deadline to spend their money—the mariachi band would count for parent involvement requirements; Dr. Seuss hats were for a reading event. I felt bad for schools nearby with a few too few poor kids to share in these riches—not because of hats and bands, but because the bulk of this money funds teachers, enabling small-group interventions and collaboration time that might help students excel.

In the Times piece, analysts suggest the White House wants to stop allocating Title I money simply based on the number of poor children. OK, that seems sensible. But a quote from a think-tank director caught my eye: “They want to upend that scheme by making states and districts pledge to take actions the administration considers reform, before they get the money.” Now “the administration considers reform” a small set of approaches, which it is pushing via a $4 billion grant program called Race to the Top. Forty-one states and D.C. have applied for the money by vowing to take certain required steps: welcoming charter schools, creating systems to track student data, adopting common standards, and recasting teacher evaluation systems, in part by factoring student test scores into decisions such as tenure or pay.

You may like some of these ideas, you may not like others. The question is whether they will help children, and the answer is that we don’t know. In the State of the Union, President Obama said he would only invest in “reform that raises student achievement.” But while the reforms required for these grants may be promising, they are not proven to raise student achievement. I like the idea of paying good teachers more, for example, but there is no comprehensive research showing that it improves learning, and the charter research is mixed. It’s one thing to encourage pet programs in a grant competition for a one-time pot of money; it’s another to write them into a law that could last a decade.

“We only reward success,” Obama said last week. The problem is, when it comes to our classrooms, we have done a terrible job at identifying the ingredients for success, and we shouldn’t pretend that we have done otherwise.

Laissez les bons temps roulez!

Isn’t that what they say in New Orleans? I wouldn’t know, because I have never been there before. Remedying that tomorrow with my dear friend Laura. I will be visiting the set of a TV show, meeting with top-notch reporters, and eating eating eating. I am also really looking forward to learning more about the massive upheaval of the city’s schools. It was nothing short of idiotic for Arne Duncan to say that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened” to New Orleans schools—myself, I like to take my school reform without 1,800 deaths and $80 billion in damages—but it is true that much of a bad system is being basically rebuilt from scratch. I have said this before, but Sarah Carr at the Times-Picayune has done a great job of documenting the clash between tradition and reform, between democracy and technocracy, that has become the underlying story of just about every education story coming out of the city.

Fewer kids, far more spending.

Dan Berrett of the Pocono Record in Pennsylvania did a nice job of laying out why spending in the school districts he covers increased 45 percent in a five-year period in which enrollment declined 5 percent. It took lots of reporting and data analysis and no small amount of time, but in my eyes it was well worth the effort. Not to mention replicable, for journalists anywhere.