Teacher Prep Programs Don't Pass the Test, Report Says

A report out today from the National Council on Teacher Quality rates more than 1,100 elementary and secondary programs at just over 600 institutions of higher education across the country and concludes that the bar is set too low for entrance into professional training, future teachers are not being adequately prepared for the classroom or new requirements such as the Common Core State Standards, and the nation’s expectations are far below those for teachers in countries where their students score higher on international exams.

NCTQ is an advocacy group that has pushed for greater accountability and transparency in the teaching profession and recently has focused on issues related to performance evaluations and preparation. The original intended scope of the NCTQ project was ambitious and would have evaluated programs in 16 areas. But the current rankings used a significantly scaled-down set of metrics, and—in many cases are based on only partial information—largely because ed schools refused to cooperate.

The new rankings, published in U.S.News & World Report, have also engendered criticism and pushback from, among others, the American Federation of Teachers, education schools and some researchers who argue that looking at a program’s course requirements or a catalog syllabus (as NCTQ did) doesn’t contribute to a meaningful evaluation.

Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ, didn’t shy away from that criticism in a call today with reporters, agreeing that the report is “not a very deep look” into the teacher prep programs. However, Walsh added, “we have scratched an inch deep, and just going that deep we found fundamental flaws and weaknesses. I wonder if you went a lot deeper what you would find.”

NCTQ used a four-star rating system to rank schools on factors such as selectivity, content preparation and student teaching requirements. Only four universities received four stars -- Furhman, Lipscomb, Ohio State and Vanderbilt --  while 163 programs earned less than one star. The lowest-rated program in the country was East Tennessee State University (NPR broke the news to the school’s dean).

Teacher quality has moved to the front burner of the crowded education policy stove in recent years, with many states adding new provisions aimed at improving student learning, eliminating de facto tenure laws, and increasing accountability for classroom learning. But teacher preparation hasn’t faced the same scrutiny, Walsh said, perhaps because the problems seem too difficult or intractable.

While some critics have come down hard on NCTQ (historian Diane Ravitch questioned the organization’s ties to reform-minded funders in a column last year) the new report does have supporters, including Mike Petrilli, vice president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C. He told me the report is “the most significant study of the decade. May it lead to the demise of the country's worst ed schools, which need to close.”

That there are significant problems in the nation’s teacher preparation system isn’t a surprise – least of all to Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, who sounded the alarm in a landmark report in 2006. The overall findings are consistent with his own research, that there are “some strong ed schools and a fair number of weak ed schools and that preparation for teachers is inadequate.” But the NCTQ report is undermined by weaknesses in the process, Levine said. (You can hear more from Levine on teacher education here.)

NCTQ has compared the organization’s ed school rankings to the historic Flexner Report in 1910, which transformed the nation’s medical training programs. But that comparison falls short in a key area, Levine said: Investigator Abraham Flexner visited the medical schools he evaluated. Another concern is that the figures NCTQ tried to dig up on its own aren’t as accurate as what schools would have provided if they had cooperated, Levine said. The rankings also don’t consider how each school’s graduates actually did on the job once they graduated, Levine said. The report “didn't consider the outcomes - it is focused entirely on the process,” Levine said.

I raised Levine’s point about site visits to Walsh in today’s press call, and she was blunt: “This is where my temper flares a little bit,” Walsh said of the criticism. She’s open to hearing ideas of how NCTQ could make more than 1,100 site visits and have time for more than just sitting in on a lecture of two – which might not even yield much information about a program’s quality.

Leaving deeper evaluations up to accreditation authorities or state agencies doesn’t necessarily mean low-quality programs will be identified and forced to improve. In 2011, the U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that in prior 12 years over half the nation's states had not rated a single teacher preparation program as inferior, a statistic he called "laughable." Those remarks came as part of the Obama administration’s attempt to turn up the heat on teacher prep, including calling for a $185-million plan to push states to improve training programs, provide incentives to shut down inferior ones, and make state licensing exams more challenging.

Just how uncooperative were some ed schools in NCTQ’s requests for data? Walsh said the organization had to hire attorneys in nine states. One of those cases goes to trial later this week – the University of Missouri contends its syllabi is intellectual property. That’s the argument the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system made – and lost – in court last winter, Walsh said. (The decision is being appealed by the MnSCU system.)

To Cory Koedel, a researcher at National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, the criticism of NCTQ’s rankings is an example of “the perfect being the enemy of the good.” There’s no question the NCTQ report breaks new ground, Koedel said, and the fact that people might want them to have done more “shouldn’t take away from all of the progress they’ve made.” He noted that NCTQ went to significant lengths to find alternate means of collecting data when a school declined to provide it outright.

“I sure hope that the pushback about incomplete data isn’t coming from the same people and programs who are withholding the data in the first place,” said Koedel, an assistant professor in in the economics department at the University of Missouri.

One ed school which did provide full cooperation was the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Dean Deborah Lowenberg Ball told me that “we didn’t think this was a particularly useful way to learn about teacher preparation, but we didn’t have any reason to withhold the information.”

The University of Michigan earned 2.5 stars on the NCTQ rankings but Ball said she’s not particularly concerned about that. She’s more interested in whether the conversation will move beyond the controversy and into a meaningful dialogue about “what good teacher preparation really requires.” An independent, in-depth review of the nation’s ed schools hasn’t yet been attempted and would be welcomed, Ball said. But that would mean moving beyond rating a school on its syllabi and focusing on how teachers perform in the classroom during the crucial first few years in the profession, and then finding the best way to support them, Ball said.

“If this report can get people to care about that, I’ll be happy,” Ball said. “If all it does is get people to point fingers … that won’t advance the conversation at all.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: Is Third Grade Retention a Help or Hindrance?

We asked some of the journalists attending EWA's 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University in May, to contribute posts from the sessions. You can find additional content, including video, at EdMedia Commons. Dave Murray of the Grand Rapids Press is today's guest blogger.

Educators are pretty clear that children need to read at grade level by third grade so they can use that skill to learn other subjects.

But what if they don’t?

More states are embracing the idea of holding back those students to repeat the third grade. Researchers Martin West (Harvard University) and Shane Jimerson (UC-Santa Barbara) squared off in a passionate – and occasionally loud – debate over whether retention prepares students to be successful when they eventually move ahead, or send them careening down a path to dropping out later on.

West said one of the goals is to put pressure on districts not to have to make that decision in the third grade– making improvements in kindergarten, first and second grade instruction so students are better prepared by the time third grade rolls around.

“One of the dirty secrets of American education is that teachers who are ineffective in grades three through eight get moved to kindergarten through second grade where there are no accountability systems in place,” he said.

West is an assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on education policy and governance.

He said Florida was one of the first states to adopt the retention rule, with 14 states and the District of Columbia now with policies in place or under consideration.

Studies have shown big short-term improvement in reading and math, and that two years after being retained, students show a full year of academic progress.

Coalitions such as the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading point to figures showing two-thirds of fourth-graders are not proficient readers, including four out of every five low-income students.

But Jimerson questions the statistics and said there are disturbing trends for students that are held back. The key, he said, is a series of interventions aimed at helping students long before they hit third grade.

Jimerson is in UCSB’s department of counseling, clinical and school psychology in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education.

He disputes the idea that students offered “the gift of time” will catch up with peers, saying they’ll only show improvement with targeted interventions that schools often lack.

“If the students didn’t get help they need the first time through, they’re almost guaranteed for failure the second time,” he said.

He said black and Hispanic students in Florida are retained at disproportionate levels.

Jimerson said research shows students who are retained are more likely to show emotional distress, have low self-esteem, develop poor peer relations, use drugs and alcohol, and show violent behavior – and that third-grade retention is one of the more powerful predictors of dropping out when the students are older.

The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading calls for a focus on three areas, including early childhood education with more access to books and adults reading to the youngest students.

The group also calls for cracking down on chronic absenteeism and instituting programs to prevent summer learning loss.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

How a St. Louis Story Became a Toronto Education Scandal

Aisha Sultan, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's parenting columnist, was searching the Nexis digital archive of newspaper articles last week when a troubling pairing caught her eye – her name, and the word “plagiarism.”

Clicking on the link to the Toronto Star, Sultan learned she unwittingly had played a not-so-minor role in a major scandal for Canada’s largest school district. And it had all unfolded five months earlier, nearly 800 miles away.

Chris Spence, the director of Toronto’s public school system – the Canadian equivalent of an American superintendent –  resigned in disgrace in January after it was determined his opinion piece published by the Star contained material plagiarized from several sources, including the New York Times. Numerous additional examples of Spence’s plagiarism were subsequently uncovered by local media. Among them: He took several passages verbatim from an emotionally charged column in which Sultan described telling her children about the Sandy Hook school shooting. In Spence’s version, he replaced Sultan’s son with his own.

From Sultan’s Dec. 14 online column, posted just hours after the tragedy in Newtown, Conn.:

... When I looked at my 7-year-old son, I put on my calmest face.
"A terrible and sad thing happened today," I said. "Someone shot a gun at a school."
He looked at me for a minute, trying to understand what I had said.
"Was anyone killed?"
"Yes, some people were killed. It's very sad. But your school is safe. And I will do anything and everything to make sure you and your sister are always safe at school."
Then I hugged him. 

From Spence's version published two days later:

... When I looked at my 10-year-old son, Jacob, I put on my calmest face.
“A terrible and sad thing happened today,” I said. “Someone shot a gun at a school.”
He looked at me for a minute, trying to understand what I had said.
“One of your schools, Dad? Was anyone killed?”
“No, not one of ours but, yes, some people were killed. It’s very sad. But your school is safe. And I will do anything and everything to make sure you and your sister are always safe at school.”
Then I hugged him.

Spence's version goes on to lift several subsequent paragraphs directly from Sultan's column.

Having your work appropriated without proper attribution isn’t an unusual experience for a professional writer. But the plagiarism of Sultan’s column crossed a different line altogether.

“This was a personal narrative story of mine about my own family,” Sultan said. “I read those sentences I had written but with some other kid’s name put into it, and I thought ‘What are you doing leading a school district?’”

In a Jan. 25 note to readers, Star public editor Kathy English addressed the Spence controversy and a separate incident involving insufficient sourcing in stories by one of the paper's reporters. She wrote that "we will be editing and appending notes to the online and archive versions of these articles to tell readers these stories included improper attribution." However, as of Thursday Spence's opinion pieces on  extracurricular sports and the Newtown shooting were still available on the newspaper's website with no explanation that the content contains plagiarism. I tried unsuccessfully, by telephone and email, to reach both English (who was away from the office this week) and Star editor Michael Cooke for comment.

The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism education and training center in St. Petersburg, Fla.,  recommends newspapers "place editor’s notes atop any online content that contained plagiarized or fabricated material. If original, offending content must be removed, place the editor’s note at the same URL where the work previously appeared."

Let’s be clear here: Spence certainly had to know what he was doing was wrong. He earned $272,000 annually to run the Toronto District School Board, which serves about 250,000 students. As in most school systems, Toronto’s students are expected to follow a code of conduct, and plagiarism is clearly defined under the board's rules on academic honesty. Additionally, some of the board's high schools already require students to run their essays through plagiarism detection software before turning them in to their teachers, according to the Star’s reporting.

Most examples of online plagiarism fall into two categories: inexperienced bloggers who don’t know the rules of attribution or automated sites that are reposting content without permission, said Jonathan Bailey, a consultant who created the website Plagiarism Today to track incidents. The scale of Spence’s plagiarism (which appears to stretch back years), combined with his high-profile position, “is a rare case,” Bailey said.

Bailey wasn’t surprised that Sultan hadn’t been contacted by the Canadian newspapers reporting the Spence scandal. The media's top priority was to gather enough evidence to prove a pattern, rather than right the wrongs Spence committed, Bailey said. He also wasn’t surprised that Spence’s public apology had extended to the newspaper that had printed his op-eds and the school system that had employed him – but not to the writers whose work was stolen. Plagiarists often default to what Bailey called the “non-apology apology” – at best appearing embarrassed for being careless without acknowledging any intentional wrongdoing.

"Serial plagiarists rarely offer apologies," Bailey said. "It might say something about the psyche of a serial plagiarist that, even when caught, they focus solely on their misdeeds, their lies, their coworkers and their friends rather than the more faceless people they pulled from."

(I tried without success to reach Spence. If he’s reading this, Sultan would like him to know she would still appreciate an apology. She’s easy to find.)

Kelly McBride, senior faculty at the  Poynter Institute and an expert on media ethics, said the writers whose work was misappropriated by Spence, along with the outlets that first published their work, are indeed owed an apology.

And perhaps Sultan should be at the top of that list. Spence’s misuse of Sultan’s column constituted “a bigger lie” than some of the other examples of his plagiarism, McBride said.

"It’s a different moral transgression than if I take some facts and figures from somewhere, and I say ‘I read a report,’ when really someone else did the work,” McBride told me. “On an individual, moral level, saying `This is my experience,’ when in fact it was someone else’s experience – that’s personally egregious.”

Once she got over the initial shock of finding out about the Spence scandal, Sultan said another thought had quickly come to mind: How could all of this have unfolded without her ever hearing about it?

“It’s not like the story ran in an obscure blog and no one saw,” Sultan told me. “Spence was in a high-profile position, this was big news all over Canada.”

Canadian reporters Megan O'Toole and Chris Selley of the National Post were the first to report that Spence’s trail of serial plagiarism included Sultan’s column. I asked O’Toole if anyone had considered contacting Sultan for comment. O’Toole said she wasn’t sure what the chain of events had been back in January, but the normal process probably would have been to reach out to the author whose work was plagiarized.

However, the evidence against Spence was "piling up" at such a furious pace that “it wouldn’t have been in the public interest to hold off on the story” in order to contact all of the original writers, O’Toole said. Of all of the examples, his lifting of Sultan’s material stood out as “probably the one that disturbed us the most,” she said.

I spoke with Louise Brown, a veteran education reporter for the Star who covered the Spence scandal in depth, and she was taken aback when I informed her that Sultan hadn’t known what had transpired earlier this year. Brown told me that in hindsight she regrets not reaching out to Sultan. It would have been the right thing to do, Brown said – and it would have made for a better story.

She also agreed that Spence’s pilfering of Sultan’s work was in a different league: “This wasn’t gathering data or forgetting to footnote … to realize he had actually taken this moving story and portrayed it as his own really made us stop and catch our breaths.”

With Spence’s resignation Toronto’s schools lost a popular and charismatic leader, who by many accounts was turning in a solid performance. Might his downfall serve as a cautionary tale or make someone think twice before considering similar shortcuts? What will his former students take away from this? Sultan has already used the incident as a life lesson for her children. She said she talked to them “about what it means to use another person's work without crediting them and told them about the real life consequences in this case … they were both upset to be on the receiving end of this, so hopefully they'll remember that feeling and be extra careful in their own work.”

At the same time Sultan, whose column will begin national syndication in the fall, realizes there isn’t much more she can do to protect her professional product in a digital world.

“We put our names on what we write, and we just have to trust,” Sultan said. “We have to depend on the honesty of others.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: Using 'Linked Learning' to Prepare Students for College -- And Career

We asked some of the journalists attending EWA's 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University in May, to contribute posts from the sessions. You can find additional content, including video, at EdMedia Commons. Michelle Sokol of the State Journal in Frankfort, Ky. is today's guest blogger. For a podcast of the seminar session, click here.

Students used to receive their technical education in one classroom and academic education in another — but it’s not your father’s shop class anymore.

Three panelists at EWA’s annual conference discussed how Linked Learning—an approach to secondary education championed by a nonprofit organization of the same name—is changing career and technical education. The Linked Learning model is based on the idea that schools can prepare students academically for college but at the same time give them experience with different technically oriented career paths.

The approach was launched in California shortly after the James Irvine Foundation founded ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career to expand the number of career pathways available to the state’s high school students.

Anne Stanton, program director of the Irvine Foundation, said Linked Learning approach grew from a goal of increasing the number of low-income youths who graduate high school on time and receive a postsecondary credential by the time they’re 25. Another factor was the realization that it’s not college or career -- it’s college and career.

“That’s really at the heart of Linked Learning—it’s tapping into the motivation and engagement of young people,” Stanton said. “If we do that well and tie that to rigor, we will see greater achievement, we will see greater persistence, we will see greater high school graduation and then we will see greater postsecondary transitions.”

The approach, which will be piloted in 60 districts across California next year, delivers four core components:

• Rigorous academics: That includes college preparatory English, mathematics, science, history and sometimes foreign language;

• Real-world technical skills that can give students a head start on a career;

• Personalized support, including counseling and supplemental instruction;

• Work-based learning: Stanton described this component as the opportunity to practice what you’re learning in the real world. “Very, very important is a young person’s discovery of what they’re capable of and how they fit into the broader world, not just the classroom,” she said.

Preston Thomas, principal of the LIFE Academy in Oakland, said he has seen the classroom experience transformed by Linked Learning, and he shared stories of those successes at the EWA session.

The school is made up of 36 percent English-language learners and 87 percent of the students receive free or reduced-price lunch. He said with Linked Learning the students are given the opportunity to realize their dreams.

At LIFE Academy, for example, a mental health class might look at the science of medicine and also read “Slaughterhouse-Five.” More broadly, Linked Learning can mean studying DNA beyond the theoretical frame by practicing mitochondrial sequencing. And it’s about working with industry partners to provide students work experience through internships, work-based learning or externships.

Thomas said about 250 of his students are placed within the community, but it can be costly. The school pays about $150,000 on top of grants to keep the program running, with transportation accounting for the bulk of the costs. He recognized it can be difficult to set up internships for students with industry partners and recommended that schools work through an intermediary organization.

But it’s worth the effort, he said.

“It’s about getting those kids out there and passionate about something and seeing themselves in a career field and building those skills,” he said.

Nancy Hoffman, vice president and senior advisor of Jobs for the Future, sees Linked Learning finding a place in education outside of California.

California has done a few key things, such as supporting the integration between academics and career preparation, that the rest of the country could benefit from, she said.

“The job market has changed,” Hoffman said. “There’s slowly a perception changing across the country that everybody needs technical skills. That’s beginning to erode a little bit of the stigma about technical education.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

School's (Still) In: Making the Most of Summer Learning

While students are celebrating the start of the long summer break, there's a significant tradeoff for the three months of leisure - on average, students will return to school in the fall a month behind where they performed in the spring. And the learning loss is even greater for low-income students who were already behind their more affluent peers.

We'll focus on these issues Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time in an EWA Webinar School's Still In: Making the Most of Summer Learning.  We'll examine how districts are successfully combating summer learning loss with high-quality programs and leveraging community partnerships to help pay for them. Additionally, Florida districts are using the summer months to prepare both students and teachers for the new Common Core State Standards. Reporters will come away with a deeper understanding of the issues, and story ideas to explore for their own readers. 

Our presenters include Catherine Augustine, RAND Corporation; and Jacqueline Bowen, executive director of secondary programs for Duval County (Fla.) Public Schools. We'll also hear from Gary Huggins, chief executive officer of the National Summer Learning Association, about new survey asking teachers about the challenges of getting students back on track in the fall following the long summer break.

Register today, and we'll see you Thursday!

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

New Report: High School Graduation Rate Continues Uptick, Nears 75 percent

The nation’s high school graduation rate is approaching 75 percent, its highest rate in 40 years, according to a new report from Education Week. Of course, that good news must be tempered with a sobering statistic – an estimated 1 million students will fail to graduate this year, a loss of 5,500 students for every day on the academic calendar.

The annual Diplomas Count report tracks graduation rates across the country and calculated the national average at 74.7 percent for the class of 2010, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s nearly 8 percentage points higher than the graduation rate for the class of 2000. Vermont had the nation's highest graduation rate at 85 percent with the District of Columbia finishing last at 57 percent. Between 2000 to 2010, graduation rates are up in 46 states, although the size of those gains varies widely – from a tenth of a percentage point in Virginia to 31.5 percentage points in Tennessee.

The nationwide graduation rate calculated by Ed Week is lower than the one released in a January report from the U.S. Department of Education - 78.2 percent for the 2009-10 academic year -- which was touted as the highest level in three decades. Some disparity in reported rates isn't unusual. Until recently there were marked differences in how individual states calculated and reported high school graduates. Data reported for the 2010-11 academic year marks the first time all of the states used a uniform measure to calculate graduation rates, in accordance with a compact signed by the nation's governors in an effort to improve accuracy and accountability.

Significant jumps in the percentages of black and Latino students graduating were an important factor in the improved nationwide graduation rate, according to Ed Week. The full report, and the spotlight stories focusing on efforts to get dropouts back in school, is well worth reading. I was particularly interested in the data on young adults ages 16-21. Here’s what that group – 27 million -- looks like nationally:

• ·More than 20 million are in school, either K-12 or higher ed;

•  5.1 million graduated but are not enrolled in a post-secondary institution;

• 1.8 million young adults (which, not surprisingly, includes a disproportionate percentage of minorities) have left school without a diploma. Of those 1.2 million of them—66 percent—are not working. 

That last group, categorized by Ed Week as potentially "recoverable youth" that could still benefit from public education programs, is understandably a cause of particular concern. The depths of the recession and the lack of low-skills jobs means high school dropouts are finding themselves squeezed out of the workforce -- and future life opportunities. This year’s Ed Week report (subtitled "Second Chances") focuses on efforts by community groups, schools, districts and states to find creative ways to lure dropouts back to class. The underlying message: With a high school education now a prerequisite for a reasonable standard of living, it’s worth the multiple attempts it often takes to get the diploma into the student’s hand.

“The personal stakes for someone who doesn’t at least finish their high school education are dire,” said Christopher Swanson, vice president of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Ed Week. “It’s difficult to bring people back to school after they’ve dropped out especially if they’re way behind and there are other demands on them that pull them away. But it’s so important for what they’re able to do with their lives after that.”

Asian students had the highest graduation rate (81 percent) followed closely by white students (80 percent). To be sure, a significant opportunity and achievement gap remains for minority students, although the Ed Week report notes some  positive, decade-long trends:

• The gap between Latino and white students has been cut in half, with a graduation rate of  68 percent for Latinos;

• Black students posted a graduation rate of 62 percent, which represents a 30 percent narrowing of the gap with white students.

On the downside, Native American students continue to have the lowest graduation rate of the ethnic groups, at 51.1 percent in 2010. It’s worth noting that the forced budget cuts of the federal sequester are being felt particularly hard by schools that receive what’s known as “impact aid” and serve students living on Indian reservations.

Over the past decade there have been numerous initiatives at the local, state and national level to improve the nation’s graduation rate, particularly among historically underserved student populations. It appear that groundswell is building into momentum on several fronts, and the next step – for educators, policymakers, community groups, families, and the students themselves – will be to sustain it. One issue that will need consideration: How to find the resources for the personalized, intensive, wraparound services and support to help students at risk of dropping out.

From the Ed Week report:

"I'd like to think [attention to dropouts] comes from a surge of academic conscience, but every student that drops out is a capital loss … and every one brought back is a reclaimed revenue source," says Larry M. Perondi, the superintendent of the 20,300-student unified school district in Oceanside, Calif. "It's real easy to not think about these kids because they're not the easiest population to work with, but there are so many of them, … and, man, there are some really bright kids who have dropped out of school."

Expect the Ed Week data to will yield stories from individual states; there should be plenty of attention on Tennessee’s education reform efforts which seem to be bearing fruit. On the flipside, there also ought to be a spotlight on what Ed Week calls the “epicenters of the graduation crisis” – the 25 school systems accounting for 18 percent of the dropouts. Not surprisingly the nation’s first and second largest school districts (New York City and Los Angeles) lead the pack. “Dropout factories” will likely return to the top of the education buzzword list.

It will also be interesting if the data work their way into the ongoing conversation about the new Common Core State Standards, which have faced a barrage of criticism in recent weeks. How might the roll-out of the new academic expectations, including the new assessments that come with them, affect graduation rates in coming years? Could short-term bumps in the road during the implementation make it harder to hold on to students already struggling? Or is there a potential long-term payoff on the horizon? Might the higher expectations of the common core increase the value of a high school diploma, and a student’s chances of being college and career-ready when they earn one?

“I think you can spin different scenarios where the common core could negatively impact graduation rates,” Swanson told me Wednesday. “But there are separate story lines that could play out related to the standards themselves versus the assessments versus how the assessments might be used for accountability purposes at the individual level – such as a student’s promotion or graduation. How states might decide to use those assessments for those purposes is in their court. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.

Guest Post: Thomas Friedman on Competition, Common Core, and the Surge of MOOCs

EWA's 66th National Seminar, held at Stanford University, took place in May. We asked some of the journalists attending to contribute posts from the sessions. The majority of the content will soon be available at EdMedia Commons. 

You can watch the video of Thomas Friedman's conversation with EWA president (and Wall Street Journal education reporter) Stephanie Banchero here:

Patrick O'Donnell of the Cleveland Plain Dealer is today's guest blogger.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman doesn’t write about education, as such. He writes about power and about changes on a global level.

But he told the audience at EWA’s National Seminar that education is just a few simple steps away from his focus. Here’s how: A key force in global power is economic growth, he said. And a key driver of economic growth is education.

“Traveling around the world, education is the biggest foreign policy issue,” he said.

In the “hyper-connected” world we have today, he said, everyone is competing against everyone else in the world. Everyone has access to the best software, resources and people, making anyone that is just average irrelevant in the marketplace.

“The whole global curve just rose,” he said.

Friedman, best known to the general public for his 2005 bestseller The World Is Flat, resurrected parts of his standard book tour speech as he took questions from Wall Street Journal education reporter Stephanie Banchero while they both sat on the stage throughout.

Banchero praised him in her introduction for his ability to connect education, growth and economic sustainability. For an hour, she asked for his perspective on what holds America back on the global stage, what prevents education from adapting to its new challenges, the future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and if he sees any similar disruptive forces on the horizon for K-12 education.

Friedman drew on themes from the new book he co-authored in 2011 called That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, saying that the United States missed an opportunity when the Cold War ended. America rested, he said, letting its guard down after a long and costly struggle.

But for the rest of the world, he said, that was the starting gun. Markets and opportunities opened up, with millions of individuals seizing the chance to compete with Americans.

Nations are also more focused on competing too, he said, so that every nation - not just the United States - is concerned about where it stands educationally compared to other countries.

Even places that score better than the United States on some tests, he said, have debates about whether they teach the right mix of things.

Friedman said the world has changed so much since he wrote The World is Flat that a success like Facebook does not even appear in that book. In that time, whole new companies and professions have arisen – search engine optimization, for example – and the need to keep learning throughout life, to adapt and invent your own job has become more crucial than ever.

Friedman praised the imminent Common Core standards. He said that beyond raising expectations of students, having multiple states using the same standards will allow programmers to write materials that serve a broader audience instead of the fractured one now.

“You’re going to see a huge amount of innovation coming off the Common Core,” he predicted.

In keeping with the conference’s theme of “Innovation in Education and the Media,” and in keeping with the setting – Stanford is the birthplace of MOOC powers Udacity and Coursera – Friedman spoke at length about them.

“This is the beginning of a real revolution,” he said.

He said that MOOCs are still in a comparable stage to the computer businesses that started in the garages of innovators. But they are already catching on. He said Coursera had about 260,000 students when he wrote a column about it last year. It now has three million.

He predicted a time in the near future where the top teachers in a subject will put their classes online, students in schools will use them and their teachers will be able to give more direct help to students in the classroom. Friedman expects this change for K-12 students, as well as college students most MOOCs are aimed at now.

Friedman said that the cost of a traditional college experience is beginning to cripple students financially, while also failing to provide the fast-changing skills that employers seek. Cheaper, more focused and easily updated MOOCs could be the answer. He predicted that MOOCs and industry will eventually find a way for completion of MOOCs to provide the credentials employers need, instead of a traditional degree.

“This is coming,” Friedman said. It’s going to be huge. Ignore this revolution at your own peril.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. Follow her on Twitter: @EWAEmily.