I was very disappointed in the logical fallacies, and the boogeymen, that [Diane Ravitch] kept bringing up. “We must improve them (schools), not lose them.” She seems absolutely convinced that there is a movement afoot to destroy public schools and to privatize them. If you believe that’s so, then her statements make sense. If you don’t, and she offered no evidence that it’s so, then she’s insane. She piled on: There are two goals of the “corporate reform movement”, privatization and deprofessionalism…

Her bad statistics and bad logic could have been picked out by my first-year statistics students. At one point, when talking about how charter schools in Milwaukee haven’t improved education, she said that African-American charter students in Milwaukee score no better than African-American students in Mississippi. Uh, to determine if the schools are an improvement over Milwaukee’s public schools, shouldn’t those kids be compared to African-American students in Milwaukee public schools? She makes several of these types of errors. In another attack on Michelle Rhee she mentioned something, I didn’t write down what, that good teachers do, and then said that “Michelle Rhee certainly didn’t do that in DC.” Great applause line, but Michelle Rhee never taught in DC, she was the chancellor (superintendent) of the public schools there…

I didn’t expect a red meat feeding frenzy. From someone of Ravitch’s stature I expected much more intelligence, decency, and evidence. It’s not that I disagreed with her–I knew going in that that was the case–it’s just that I expected better. I was truly disappointed at the intellectual shallowness of her talk. This was the great Diane Ravitch? Really?

California teacher Darren Miller, surmising what Dropout Nation and others have been saying about the once-respectable education historian.

Imagine, for a moment, what could happen if teachers unions came to the negotiating table with an open mind and a realization that parental choice is about educating children, not protecting the few teachers who are failing them. Teachers are committed professionals who did not choose this vocation in order to become rich and famous. They genuinely care about educating our children and we should respect that.

However, we also must hold them accountable for our children’s academic success and failure. Fighting merit pay, which deals with so much more than student test scores and could actually reward the best teachers, is tone-deaf. Restricting teachers willing to put in extra work is counter-intuitive. Telling parents they should have no power in the way their child’s school is run or where their child is educated is simply inhumane and cruel.

MSNBC Commentator Michelle Bernard, commenting on the declining influence of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. One reason for their decline: The No Child Left Behind Act, which, as this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast explains, has changed the conversation on teacher quality.

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Yesterday, Dropout Nation analyzed how the National Education Association’s Connecticut affiliate was taking a defensive move against school reformers with its two-week commercial buy touting its legislative agenda — and how it reflected the next trend for teachers’ unions in their effort to preserve the privileges from which they derive their declining influence. Today, the American Federation of Teachers’ notoriously bellicose New York City local (whose boss, Michael Mulgrew, is angling to one day succeed predecessor — and current national president — Randi Weingarten) rolled out its own ad buy. Targeting the school reform record of Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is now looking to burnish his success in overhauling what was once the toxic waste dump of American public education with a push for a series of new initiatives such as $20,000 bonuses for teachers rated highly-effective on evaluations, the AFT is proclaiming that the mayor still “doesn’t get” that his efforts aren’t appreciated by the union. The commercials compliment a series of full-page ads being placed by the union in the Daily  News that are supposed to be open letters rallying against the mayor’s efforts, including his push to use value-added analysis of student test score data in teacher evaluations.

This campaign isn’t just aimed at Bloomberg and attempting to appeal to Big Apple residents. After all, this will be an election year in the Empire State with Democrats seeking to regain control of the senate from Republicans. More importantly, the AFT is in the midst of a court battle (and related settlement talks) with the New York State Education Department and the state Board of Regents over its effort to allow states to allow for Value-Added analysis of state student test data to account for 40 percent of a teacher’s rating under the new teacher evaluation system. Meanwhile Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who successfully nudged education officials to allow for state test data to play a bigger role in evaluations, is continuing his teacher quality reform efforts (and also keep the $700 million in federal dollars the state received through the Race to the Top initiative). So the AFT’s Big Apple and Empire State affiliates find themselves in a pitched battle to preserve their influence. The AFT local’s ad campaign can be seen as another effort to beat back the efforts of the state’s reform-minded politicians and remind both Democrats and Republicans in Albany that they are dependent on teachers’ union dollars.

Image courtesy of GothamSchools

This play is also likely an attempt to shape the big election facing the Big Apple next year: Who will succeed Bloomberg as mayor, and thus, boss of the nation’s largest — and most reform-minded — school system. With the reformers such as state Board of Regents Chairman Meryl Tisch and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn likely to run for the job — and AFT allies such as city Comptroller John Liu either struggling with political scandals or lack of strong political backers — the AFT must also work hard to reshape the political game on the ground in order to stave off what would likely be another decade of strong reform efforts. Given that the AFT’s string of recent public relations disasters in New York City — including the failed lawsuit it filed along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to shut down expansion of charter schools — Mulgrew has to garner some sort of victory. Especially if he wants to succeed the (until-recently) more politically-masterful Weingarten.

Certainly the AFT’s New York City local has the cash horde to pull out an even bigger public relations blitz. After all, the local spent $26 million in 2010-2011 on so-called representational activities, political lobbying, and contributions to organization’s such as the NAACP’s New York branch, according to its filing with the U.S. Department of Labor. One can also expect the state affiliate and perhaps, even the national union, to join in. After all, for Weingarten, a victory in her home state and in the Big Apple would also do wonders for the union’s national efforts. Either way, the AFT local’s ad buy just proves again that school reformers will have to go big in the coming battles to come.

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When an affiliate of the nation’s largest teachers’ union buys commercial time during the National Football League’s NFC Champion game, it certainly gets notice. That is exactly what the National Education Association’s Connecticut local did yesterday when it began its two-week campaign to push for its legislative agenda. And for school reformers, it is both a preview of the political battle that will come in the next few months within the nation’s statehouses — and a reminder that they will have to step up their political game to advance reform.

With the pleasant voice-over declaring that the union is pushing to “replace teacher tenure” and for greater “parental involvement”, the NEA’s commercial campaign is at least superficially appealing. The fact that its actual agenda actually calls for none of that at all — and merely offers a series of mild proposals, including a plan to reduce the time required for firing laggard teachers by 35 days, and cultural sensitivity training for the school governance councils through which the state’s Parent Trigger law is exercised — makes the ad campaign rather disingenuous. But the NEA’s attempt in Connecticut to play the same triangulation effort being tried at the national level by the American Federation of Teachers is at least slightly better than the bellicose messaging of its sister affiliates elsewhere.

But in many ways, the NEA has no other choice in this state. Why? Because it and its fellow education traditionalists are on the defensive. Over the past two years, school reformers have had some success, passing the nation’s second Parent Trigger law, and passing other measures allowing the state to take over failing districts. The Nutmeg State’s education department made waves last year when it took over Bridgeport’s collection of failure mills (and ruffled the feathers of Parent Power activists concerned about the secrecy of its process) and hiring  former Chicago and Recovery School District boss Paul Vallas to lead the overhaul. With Gov. Dan Malloy offering a series of reforms this legislative session — and the state’s school superintendents’ association breaking ranks with its fellow education traditionalist groups — the NEA and AFT, along with other status quo defenders, are on their own.

This defensive crouch became a proverbial fetal position last year when Dropout Nation revealed that a presentation by the AFT AFT and its Connecticut affiliate on how the union watered down legislation that created the Parent Trigger law, excluded Parent Power and other school reform groups such as ConnCAN from back-room negotiations with state legislators, and ultimately, helped oust Jason Bartlett, the state representative whose work helped lead to its passage. The revelations, which led national AFT President Randi Weingarten to issue a series of non-apology apologies (and even a formal in-person apology to  legislators and Connecticut Parents Union President Gwen Samuel),still echo in the mind of Nutmeg State legislators — and not in a good way. As a result, educational traditionalists — especially the NEA (which itself isn’t all that happy with either the AFT’s presentation or the sister union’s brag that it had to drag it “kicking and screaming” into efforts to water down the law) — will now have to work harder to keep the status quo ante.

Meanwhile the AFT fiasco has taught Nutmeg State school reformers that they need to step up their own game. They are putting those lessons to use.

Last week, the Connecticut Parents Union captured headlines with its own press conference laying out its legislative agenda to advance Parent Power; this includes requiring schools directly controlled by the NEA and AFT through the state’s Compact Schools initiative to have school governance councils and, thus, be subjected to the Parent Trigger law. Through its work helping families in Ohio launch a Parents Union, and its support of Illinois mother Annette Callahan in her battle against Zip Code Education, the Connecticut Parents Union has also won considerable goodwill with (and support from) organizations such as Democrats for Education Reform, Students For Education Reform, and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which it can mass for its agenda. (Disclosure: Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle is a member of the Connecticut Parents Union’s advisory board.)

At the same time, longtime reform player ConnCAN and its new boss, Patrick Riccards, have taken apart the NEA’s proposals. The organization is also pushing its own school reform agenda in Connecticut’s statehouse, and could end up tag-teaming with the Connecticut Parents Union and others on efforts to revamp teacher evaluations and tenure.

Then there is a possible looming threat in the form of StudentsFirst, the school reform group launched by former D.C. Public Schools czar Michelle Rhee which has embraced the kind of political tactics (and ad campaigning) once reserved for political campaigns. Last year, StudentsFirst spent $900,000 in Michigan to advance an array of teacher quality and school choice reforms; it could easily pour similar dollars into Connecticut if reformers on the ground ask for the help. The very idea of Rhee and her team of ex-Democratic National Committee operatives launching ad campaigns isn’t exactly music to NEA or AFT ears.

So the NEA’s Connecticut affiliate has to take its considerable coffers to the airwaves in order to shape this session’s debates in their favor — and, by advertising during one of the nation’s biggest sporting events, quietly reminding legislators that the union may mobilize against them in upcoming primary and general election campaigns. The national union may also play its part. As Dropout Nation reported last month, the NEA poured $157,000 into Idahoans for Responsible Education Reform, which, along with the union’s Potato State affiliate, is looking to challenge school reforms successfully championed by the state’s school superintendent, Tom Luna, and Gov. Butch Otter, according to the union’s 2010-2011 filing with the U.S. Department of Labor; currently, the group is now looking to subject Luna to a recall. Don’t be surprised if the national union also provides funding to statewide progressive activist groups (as it has done in Ohio and Michigan), who can then attack centrist and liberal Democrat legislators supporting proposed reforms.

School reformers across the nation shouldn’t be surprised at what the NEA is doing in Connecticut. In fact, they should they expect NEA and AFT affiliates in other states to do the same. The success of reformers in passing school choice measures in 13 states, along with the string of victories on the teacher quality front (including the abolition of collective bargaining in states such as Wisconsin and Tennessee) have once again reminded the two unions that they will have to battle hard in every statehouse, either to stop reformers in their tracks or offer triangulating half-measures. The fact that families and taxpayers alike no longer feel much solidarity with NEA and AFT locals, and that school reformers have succeeded in ending the two union’s unquestioned support from Democrat politicians,has also put the NEA and AFT on the defensive. As governors and legislators tackle fiscal woes — including $1.1 trillion in teachers’ pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs, along with increasing Medicaid burdens — the unions are fighting to preserve the array of traditional teacher compensation arrangements (including near-lifetime employment and degree- and seniority-based pay) that have long sustained their influence and have won them support from rank-and-file members. And as state legislators in Indiana, Wisconsin, and elsewhere consider right-to-work legislation that would further reduce public-sector union influence, the NEA and AFT must fight harder just to stay in place.

Up to now, the NEA and AFT have taken different approaches to their political efforts; the former, by funding outfits such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in order to build coalitions against reform, while the AFT has engaged in triangulation by offering a sort of school reform lite. But with the former’s strategy failing miserably (and the AFT’s efforts not going so well), the NEA is now attempting other approaches. While the strategy of the NEA’s Connecticut affiliate has more in common with the triangulation approach of the AFT national, its sister affiliates (along with the national union) are becoming more militant, teaming up with outfits such as ProgressNow and raising more dollars to engage in big-dollar campaigning. And school reformers, especially centrist and liberal Democrat reformers, should expect more of their allies in legislators and gubernatorial spots to find themselves being primaried by progressive Democrat activists acting as stalking horses for the NEA and its sister public sector unions.

So reformers need to be more aggressive in the political game. As I noted in November, this means embracing an even more bipartisan approach of the kind advanced by Rhee and StudentsFirst, as well as teaming up with grassroots activists (including Parent Power groups) in order to reach families ready to support reform, but often ignored by the movement’s Beltway and operator wings. And finally, reformers need to spend more money on campaigning — and ensure that those dollars equal the amounts spent on policymaking and working statehouse corridors. Just imagine if school reformers spent $59 million during one election year on just congressional races and statehouse campaigns – the same amount spent by the NEA and AFT during the 2009-2010 election cycle? Right now, the only significant ad campaign from school reformers — other than those from StudentsFirst and the efforts two years ago  by the Eli and Edythe Broad and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations — has been run by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools — and that focused largely on informing Americans about what charter schools are.

The NEA’s ad campaign in Connecticut is a preview of what is going to happen in the rest of the nation this year on the education front. And school reformers will have to get their game right in order to stay on the offensive.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I analyze the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act’s one decade after it became law. Contrary to what education traditionalists and others may declare, the law has spur the first steps at systemic reform that have helped keep more children on the path to economic and social success.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player, smartphone, Nook Color or Kindle.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also download to your phone with BlackBerry podcast software and Google Reader.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Although in the shadows of Big K.C., Kansas City, Kansas City, K.S. struggles with similar academic woes.

Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan weighed in on the failures of Kansas City, Mo.’s school district, declaring that its low graduation rates and collection of dropout factories were “a huge concern”. That statement could also apply to its sister city across the border in Kansas — especially when it comes to the low graduation and promoting power rates for young men of all races. Little Kansas City epitomizes one of the reasons why we must expand accountability — requiring districts to focus on addressing the underlying illiteracy, special education over-labeling, and overuse of suspensions and expulsions — that is the underlying reason why so many young men in both Kansas Citys and throughout America — end up in poverty and prison.In this Best of Dropout Nation from March 2010, Editor RiShawn Biddle illustrates the problems in little Kansas City. Read, consider, and take action. And listen to tomorrow’s Dropout Nation Podcast on the importance of the No Child Left Behind Act, which has helped shine a light on the extent of little Kansas City’s — and the nation’s — education crisis.

The closing of 29 (of 61) schools by the Kansas City (Mo.) school district has captured the attention of the nation. But across the state line in the Big KC’s sister city that shares the same name, a more-fundamental crisis looms. It is one that both cities share with each other — and with other urban school systems across the nation: The young men, no matter their skin color or ethnicity, don’t graduate.

At the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year, young men made up the slight majority of Kansas City’s graduating Class of 2008. This is typical in many districts. But five years later, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the numbers reverse. Young women, no matter their race or ethnicity, make up the majority of seniors. Among blacks in the Kansas City district, young women account for a slight majority over young men in the Class of 2008; but among whites and Latinos, the young women outnumber the young men by a 3-to-2 ratio.

Black males in KC barely progress, but...

The white males do even worse. And...

Promoting power rates for young black men are, as one would expect, not high. But with 63 percent of young black male 8th-graders reaching senior year of high school (compared to 72 percent of their female counterparts), at least more than half are making it through. Among young white men, the numbers are even worse: A mere 44 percent of them made it from 8th grade to senior year versus 71 percent of young white women. And only 49 percent of the district’s Latino male 8th-graders were promoted to 12th grade; the promoting power rate for Latino females was 71 percent.

fewer Latino males make it than their sisters.

The consequences can be seen in little Kansas City’s demographic and economic statistics: Seventeen percent of the city’s residents are economically impoverished; only 10 percent of Kansas’ citizens (and 13 percent of U.S. citizens) report poverty-level incomes; 18 of Kansas City households are headed by an unmarried woman (versus 8 percent of the U.S. population). But these consequences can be felt nationwide, especially as higher educational attainment becomes key to economic sustainability.

The issues facing young women, especially young black women (who are more likely than the general population to become head of households and never marry) cannot be ignored; the likelihood that young women are being under-diagnosed for learning disabilities must always be kept in mind. The promoting power rate for Kansas City, while better in some respects than its more-populous neighbor, still means that one out of every four children are dropping out. But if the nation wants to stem the dropout crisis, it needs to work on improving academic achievement among young men. Working in little KC wouldn’t be bad place to start.

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Yesterday’s one-sentence criticism of my friend Andy Rotherham’s argument against publishing Value-Added data on individual teacher performance (also a one-liner in his otherwise thoughtful Time column arguing for parents to push for teacher choice), led the Eduwonk publisher to offer a short-yet-energetic response. From where Rotherham sits, releasing such data to the public merely provides incomplete data without any context. In his opinion,Value-Added data is a poor substitute for “an overall evaluation that includes other elements and professional judgment.” And he criticizes other supporters of publishing Value-Added data for saying “of course a teacher’s evaluation shouldn’t be based just on test scores” while supporting the release of data that “by default becomes a summative judgement”.

Your editor will not address Rotherham’s last point. As you already know, I’m skeptical of the multiple measures approach to teacher performance management — at least in the form of combining Value-Added data with student surveys and abysmally inaccurate classroom observations — because it renders evaluations less-useful to families, school leaders, and teachers. Nor am I going to spend time on Rotherham’s contention that releasing Value-Added data is akin to revealing “error rates of journalists… or doctors without regard to what they do” because the examples he cites doesn’t really apply. All journalists, for example, work for private-sector organizations from whose services customers can freely choose; besides, the stakes for consumers of media is far lower than for families choosing schools (and by proxy, the teachers who work within them).

But Rotherham’s main contention — that Value-Added data is incomplete and doesn’t provide enough data for families to fully judging teacher performance — deserves consideration. Why? Because in making his argument, Rotherham mishmashes the data needs of parents — who have to be concerned with finding high-quality educational options for their children — with those of those who operate schools and districts (who, as education service providers, must figure out how to deliver high-quality instruction and curricula).

Certainly Value-Added data is incomplete. It isn’t even perfect. But all information by the very nature of this thing called life is incomplete and imperfect. Arguing that as an underlying reason for opposing its publication doesn’t stand up to any sort of intellectual scrutiny. More importantly, what matters isn’t whether data is absolutely complete (an impossibility in the real world), but whether it provides you and other particular parties with the most-objective and important information needed to make smart decisions. As Robert Capps of Wired – he of the concept of good enough technology — would argue, that’s what counts most in every aspect of life.

School leaders, for example, need a wide array of data for their hiring, firing, and compensation decisions. Why? Because, while teacher quality is the most-important consideration, it isn’t the only one. After all, they may also want to reward teachers for developing innovative programs that address particular student learning issues, encourage more specialization among staff, or even make sure that teachers respect the rightful roles of families as lead decision-makers in education. So Value-Added data isn’t likely to be enough to inform those decisions.

Families, on the other hand, have different considerations. While they should be the lead decision-makers in education, they may not necessarily be involved in the operations of schools. They are more likely to look at education from a consumer orientation than from an operator position. Which means they will care about two things. The first?  The ability of instructors to improve student achievement over time. The second? Whether teachers care for — and empathize with — every child, regardless of who they are or where they live. So the data points they will need will be different.

For their first concern, Value-Added data meets the standard. After three decades, Value-Added has proven to be the most-objective tool in evaluating teacher performance in improving student achievement over time, allowing for families (and for everyone else) to know which teachers are doing an average job, which teachers are lagging and which teachers are doing great work. As the recent study from Harvard researchers Raj Chetty and John Friedman, along with Columbia’s Jonah Rockoff has also shown, it can also show how the performance of individual and even groups of teachers can impact the lifelong eanings of children after they leave school.

For families, Value-Added is particularly important for them in making school decisions. After all, as Rotherham rightly pointed out yesterday, the quality of a child’s education can vary from classroom to classroom. Even in the best-performing schools, traditional, charter or private, there are high-quality teachers working across the way from those who need help improving their instruction, and those who don’t need to be in classrooms at all. Even more importantly, at the elementary level, teacher quality can vary among teachers from one subject to another. In some cases, a teacher who is really strong in reading instruction may be a terrible math tutor, while her colleague down the hall is top-notch in that subject and so-so in reading. Empowering parents and caregivers with this information can help them in making high-quality decisions for their families — and spur them to push for much-needed teacher quality reforms that will benefit all of our children.

But families shouldn’t have access to this data alone because it isn’t their only concern. As I recommended last week, student surveys should be a key element of evaluating teacher performance — and those student ratings should be published as well. Not only is it an accurate assessment of teacher performance in terms of improving student achievement, it also provides insight into whether a teacher has the empathy for children needed to be successful in their jobs. Considering that the recent Measures of Effective Teaching report has shown that students (who spend as much as 35 hours a week with a given teacher) are likely far better judges of quality than trained observers, parents would find this data especially useful.

Then there are other benefits to releasing Value-Added data. For the teaching profession, it shines a well-deserved light on the work of good-to-great teachers who go without the proper recognition — in the form of wider arrays of compensation and career opportunities — that they so richly deserve, and are often forced by lower-performing colleagues to remain quiet about their achievements (or in the case of the John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes, forced out of the profession because of jealousy within the ranks). It also serves as the best disinfectant in improving the profession, exposing poor-performing teachers, who are highly paid despite their failures and who help foster cultures of mediocrity in which only some children are considered capable of learning. And publishing this data also serves as an opportunity to spotlight the failures of ed schools who are the underlying reason why laggard teachers enter the profession (and are poorly trained for their jobs) in the first place.

But let’s be clear: Rotherham isn’t alone in opposing the publishing of Value-Added data. Far too many Beltway reformers (along with teacher quality advocates such as Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp) are of the wrongful mindset that this information should be kept under lock and key from families and taxpayers. And as I have said last year, this viewpoint sadly reveals one of the biggest flaws among these players in the school reform movement. For all their talk of bold reform — including demanding the use of value-added teacher performance data in evaluations — they are unwilling to embrace it when the proverbial rubber meets the road. As a result, they are looked upon by other reformers as being paper tigers, only interested in theoretical and policy discussions instead of real-world application of those ideas. This is especially true for grassroots activists and Parent Power advocates (especially those from poor and minority backgrounds), who are intensely interested in this data because their kids are the ones most-subjected to educational neglect and malpractice in failing schools.

[The fact that these reformers can argue that Value-Added is reliable, but are then unwilling to allow for its public dissemination also makes it seem that they are talking out of both sides of their proverbial mouths. For Beltway reformers and those in the teacher quality movement, this is a matter of put up or shut up. If they really believe in the reliability of Value-Added -- a fact that has been well-established after three decades of research -- then you must support publishing that information. Period. A stance other than that betrays an intellectual inconsistency that can't hold.]

None of this is to say that I think Rotherham is one of those folks. From passionately defending the No Child Left Behind Act (and the underlying principles of fostering systemic reform), to challenging U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s claim that the law’s accountability provisions wrongly penalize well-performing schools, t0 working with organizations that are making reforms reality on the ground, Rotherham has proven himself the kind of thoughtful, action-oriented Beltway reformer his counterparts should strive to be. What I do argue is that there is incongruity between Rotherham’s rightful, thoughtful argument that families should pursue teacher choice (as well as high-quality school options) and his wrongheaded opposition to publishing the very Value-Added data that will help parents in making smarter selections in the first place.

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