The single-biggest problem in discussions about reforming American public education is that nearly all players think their belief is gospel. Both defenders of traditional public education’s status quo, and school reformers hold certain ideas that they think lead to the one and only solution (or the most-important solution of all). The reality is that it will take a wide array of solutions — including ending the culture of mediocrity and disdain for data that permeates throughout our schools and districts today.

Dropout Nation has spent pages and podcasts taking down some of those viewpoints — including the notion that poverty is the underlying cause of achievement gaps and the nation’s dropout crisis, and that some kids are incapable of handling college prep curricula. At the same time, we have also made clear that school choice is just one imperfect (and sometimes incomplete) answer to solving our dropout crisis. Below are some more beliefs that are sorely mistaken: need to be embraced with other aspects of reform:

It’s All About Standards: Embraced by the standards and accountability types in the school reform movement (including supporters of the new Common Core State Standards), it’s based on a belief that more-rigorous curriculum standards will help in holding schools and districts accountable for results, in developing tests that actually measure what students are learning and in structuring better curricula and instructional practices. This certainly makes sense. After all, without standards for learning, schools, districts and states would simply continue with the decades of educational malpractice that has led to the current woes within public education.

The problem? Start with the reality that standards won’t mean much is school curricula isn’t aligned with them. Essentially, one can create rigorous standards and explain clearly what every child should learn — and it will be useless without assuring that the curricula follows according to them. This is a critical issue because so many of the curriculum developers are either skeptical of the underlying rationale for the standards or (wrongly)  any kind of curriculum standards whatsoever.

The second problem lies with how to ensure that that the standards are actually being enforced at the school level; essentially one will have to hope that everyone involved behaves honorably (unlikely) or that a state or federal agency will hold feet to the fire (which, based on past history, still means more gamesmanship). States have struggled with this challenge for decades. Thanks to the embrace of Common Core, this will now be a national struggle as well. While folks such as Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute dance around the issue by arguing that a national non-profit board can handle the job, past experience (including that of the U.S. Department of Education with some provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act) suggests otherwise.

Ultimately, you must still improve teacher quality (along with developing more-rigorous and aligned curricula) in order to make all this work.  This means ed schools must be overhauled in order to better recruit and train teachers. It also means expanding the pool of alternative teacher training programs, and expanding Teach For America and other existing programs.

It’s All About Curriculum: The flip-side is the line of argument advanced by Robert Pondisco and his employers at Core Knowledge, among others. It is based on a couple of rather seductive notions with the usual rings of truth. The first: That teachers are only as good as the curriculum they use in instruction. The second: That standards are meaningless without strong content that provides students both with skills and background knowledge

But as with so many beliefs, rings of truth  doesn’t mean absolute truth. Forget for a moment that none of the groups actually agree on which curricula is best for improving student achievement in any subject (much less all subjects): The  curriculum-is-the-solution crowd forget that curricula doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by a series of underlying standards, goals and beliefs; it is taught by teachers who must have the subject-matter competency, entrepreneurial drive and care for the lives of children needed to be good instructors; and the underlying rigor (including teacher and curriculum evaluation) must be reinforced by  strong, thoughtful principals and superintendents. If the curricula is divorced from standards, then it will be ineffective and will cause systemic problems up and down the line (including frustrating efforts to evaluate teachers and the most-important matter of all — ensuring every child learns). If the curricula is taught by lousy teachers, the kids won’t learn. And if school leadership doesn’t do its job of fostering a culture of genius, high-quality curriculum will become low-quality in an instant.

As standards is only one part of the formula for school reform, so is curriculum. Standards and curricula both need to be of high-quality in order to be worth their respective salts. And you need systemic reforms in place in order to assure that the curricula does its job.

It’s All About  Economic Desegregation: The usual line trotted out by the Jerry Orfield-Richard Kahlenberg crowd is one based on the Civil Rights Movement concept of integration and busing. Minorities and the poor, according to this view, can’t receive the same quality of education as their white middle-class peers unless they attend school with these peers. Based on this logic, it’s better to just ship poor kids to the schools attended by middle class kids instead of improving the quality of schools in poor neighborhoods.

Kahlenberg in particular has spent the past two decades trotting out studies and school districts that supposedly prove this line of thinking. A couple of decades ago, it was Wake County, N.C. (even though its achievement gaps were never truly closed and the desegregation effort involved only a smattering of all students). These days, it is the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Md., the subject of a recent report by Heather Schwartz, a Rand Corp., researcher brought in by  Kahlenberg’s employer, the Century Foundation. This, despite the fact that Montgomery County (in which only 65 percent of black males graduate from high school, according to the Schott Foundation  for Public Education) isn’t exactly the model Kahlenberg and Schwartz claim it to be.

What I’m saying, to be kind, is that Kahlenberg and Orfield are touting a strategy (originally developed by an earlier generation of civil rights activists out of political necessity) that hasn’t worked in improving student achievement. If anything, integration has done more to keep poor and minority kids from getting high-quality education in their own neighborhoods. Magnet schools, for example, haven’t

The biggest problem with integration is that it tacitly argues that there is no way to improve the quality of education our poorest kids receive in their own neighborhoods; in essence, no one should bother reforming education so poor kids can have high-quality schools in the communities in which they live. This view ignores the success charter schools operators such as the Knowledge Is Power Program and Catholic diocesan schools in improving student achievement right in those very neighborhoods. There are other words for it, but we’ll keep them out of this family publication.

Integration is no substitute for complete, systemic and much-needed overhaul of American public education.

It Comes Down to Working Things Out at the School Level: A good number of folks, including Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, articulates this perspective (which is what used to be called site-based or school-based decision-making). From where they sit,  school bureaucracies, policymaking bodies and legislative edicts merely set up a framework for school activity — and not even a good one at that. Ultimately, the people best-suited to deciding school activities — from curriculum to hiring, evaluating and compensating teachers — are school principals,  who are closest to the ground. This perspective makes sense on its face: No matter how robust the school data system or well-informed the superintendent or state legislator, these players aren’t anywhere near the classroom and cannot observe every bit of activity that happens daily in schools.

But the school-based decision-making viewpoint ignores the complex structure that is American public education, one in which hiring and firing decisions are made not by principals and not even by superintendents, but largely controlled by collective bargaining agreements, state laws and federal and state regulations. Moving all teacher hiring-and-firing decisions down to principals (a move taken in New York City) definitely helps

If we moved to a private sector-driven education system, fully decentralized all districts or even adapted the Hollywood Model — my formula for reforming governance and delivery of education — then the site-based approach would work. Until then, we must reform every aspect of American public education in a systematic way.

You have to make all teachers better: This belief, held by many teachers union officials and teachers such as 2009 California Teacher of the Year Alex Kajitani and David B. Cohen, assumes that every teacher is capable of high-quality instruction. From where they sit, teachers need help developing their classroom instruction. Performance management should not use objective student performance data (especially test data) for hiring and firing teachers; instead, evaluations (along with so-called peer review) should be used to help laggards get better.

Nothing wrong with trying to believe that. But in the real world, some folks just aren’t fit for certain jobs. This doesn’t mean that they are terrible people and it doesn’t mean they can’t be successful in other lines of work. What it does mean that they won’t do a good-to-great job — be they lack the skills, talent, temperament or desire — in a particular field. No matter how much additional training or assistance they receive, they won’t do any better. Teachers are no exception. An instructor is no more successful in improving student achievement after 25 years of teaching than an instructor working for four years, according to a report by Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen of the Center for Reinventing Public Education. This means that a teacher that is poor-performing after four years in the classroom is unlikely to get any better 21 years down the line (and vice versa for her high-quality colleague). Given everything that we know at this moment about the impact of high-quality and low-quality teaching, we can’t afford to continue exposing kids to instruction by teachers who don’t make the grade.

Teachers union bosses and teachers have to face this reality: Many of of their colleagues lack either the subject competency, empathy for children, or entrepreneurial zeal needed to be high-quality teachers. Quite a few lack all three characteristics. They are all too willing to mire themselves, their students and their colleagues in mediocrity in order to collect their paychecks. These teachers cannot be made better. The best solution is to improve how we recruit and train teachers, and develop performance management systems that separate good-to-great teachers from those who aren’t.

Editor’s Note: Originally, I had mentioned that Core Knowledge was opposed to standards. Robert Pondisco took time to note that Core Knowledge did support Common Core. For accuracy’s sake, I have made the proper correction. Apologies to all for the error.

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Five years ago, amid all the talk about charter and vouchers, I had proposed a reform of how we structure public education that departed from the concept of school districts and school boards. Calling it the Hollywood Model, it is based on how the entertainment is structured: Major studios handle financing and distribution; independent producers handle the actual movie-making; and post-production houses handle the ancillaries. In education, a district would no longer be in the business of actually educating students, but handle such matters as distributing funds and providing transportation services to an array of independent community, charter, private and parochial schools (along with solo tutoring by independent teachers) that actually handled academic instruction. Other outfits would handle such matters as special education services and afterschool programs, freeing up schools to focus on what they should do best.

Half a decade later, amid all the debate over the possible impact of President Obama’s I3 reform effort, folks such as Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli are coming close to my conclusion: A radical departure from the school district concept is necessary. From where Hess sits in particular, neither most school reformers nor defenders of the status quo are having a much-needed conversation about how the very governance and delivery structure of American public education must be radically transformed altogether; I3n in particular, will do little more than support well-worn (and already-subsidized) efforts such as the controversial Success for All.

This isn’t an inconsiderable issue. One of the biggest challenges to school reform is structural. In California, for example, the byzantine array of state agencies and boards that govern the K-12 and higher education systems — a legacy of the Progressive Era of the 20th Century — complicates even efforts to develop a fully-longitudinal data system. While other states don’t have educational structures that are as monumentally cumbersome, they still have the basic school-district-state board-state education department-teacher licensing structure — and face the same bureaucratic and special interest challenges. Although a few states (Florida and Indiana, to name two) have succeeded in overcoming structure to make reforms a reality, this has happened only because of the hard work of school reformers both within and outside the system. And in any case, none have been able to fully overhaul how public education does its most-important job: Educating children so they can fulfill their educational, economic and social destinies.

But at this moment, not even Hess, Petrilli (or Petrilli’s boss, Fordham Institute President Checker Finn), offer a workable solution. Fordham, in particular, has argued for eliminating local school boards — which are often an obstacle to reform (and in other cases, are rarely unified enough to lead an overhaul) — and it is a seductive solution. But currently, this means moving local school governance up to state education departments. Given their abysmal record in taking over local schools and whole districts — and their overall lack of capacity to do this work — it may be unworkable. Allowing third parties to handle governance — a feature of charter schools in Indiana, Ohio and New York, in particular — may work. But as Fordham notes in its own experience, this isn’t easy to do. Ultimately, both approaches are just nibbles around the edges, not true overhauls. Nor does it help foster other changes needed to improve the quality of education — including expanding the array of compensation needed to recruit high-quality talent into teaching.

This is why the Hollywood Model must be part of the school reform conversation. A 19th century system isn’t going to get the job done in 2010.

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Remember, read to your sons and daughters.

“We’re going to stop lying to children and lying to families [about curriculum quality]… We have to challenge the status quo on when schools are failing… We think it is unacceptable” — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on Common Core State Standards and overhauling failing schools at the Military Child Education Coalition’s annual conference, via Dropout Nation’s Twitter feed (go ahead and follow).

“What’s frustrating is that there is a real issue here demanding attention. The trade-off between flexibility and prescriptiveness in federal school turnaround policy is a complicated one without a lot of good answers.  Too much flexibility and districts and states take the easy way out and do nothing meaningful for students stuck in lousy schools. Too prescriptive and you get meaningless box-checking (as we may be seeing overall with the current dollop of school improvement funds), perverse consequences, or you stifle innovative approaches that might work if educators could try them.” – Andy Rotherham responding to Michael Winerip’s claptrap of an article on the consequences of federal education policy.

“We need to push school districts to frame summer school as a good thing, something extra — not a punishment. There is a cultural barrier that we have to overcome.” – Ron Fairchild of the National Summer Learning Association on the need for summer learning (and ultimately, for year-round schooling), in Time.

“But why are we more willing to overlook lackluster test scores in middle class schools?” Mike Petrilli on laggard middle class schools (traditional and charter).

“My hope is that many of them improve, but at the same time, we need to make sure the bar is high. I’ve got two children in the system, and I don’t want a ‘minimally effective teacher’ and I don’t think anyone else does, either.” — D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on her decision to dismiss 241 laggard teachers.

“Each year we visit the teachers at least twice – once in the beginning and ten again towards the end of the year. It’s a great opportunity to understand how our kids are progressing and to brainstorm areas of concern or ask questions. But the one thing that always surprised me is that no one from the school has ever asked us to review the teachers. Ever… I think the current model doesn’t give enough credit to our great teachers and doesn’t shine a bright enough light on the teachers that aren’t delivering the goods.” — Tech investor Bijan Sabat on the need to evaluate teachers.

“While you argue about Duncan and standardized testing and charters…teach little keisha, tyrone, twon how to read, ok?” — Nikolai Pizarro (@iwantwealth) on the complaining of defenders of traditional public education over school reform.

Check out Dropout Nation this week for news and commentary on the reform of American public education. And listen to this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on recruiting, developing and rewarding more good-to-great teachers.

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We need a Chase Mielke in every urban classroom. Let's get to making it happen. Photo courtesy of the Kalamazoo Gazette

One problem within the debates over education reform is what I call the “magic bullet-shooting holes” fallacy: The tendency of each side to either attempt to use some sort of magic bullet to prove their argument or tear down the argument by complaining that the research is full of holes. Given the fact that education research is, for the most part, so notoriously lacking in rigor that debates can end up being little more than shouting matches with five-dollar words in substitute for salty language, this isn’t surprising. But it often means that one of the two sides tend to miss the point entirely.

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek– one of the foremost researchers in education — exemplifies this in a commentary on Education Next about addressing the low level of academic instruction in America’s poorest schools. Arguing that there is more inference than evidence that low teacher quality is the underlying cause of woeful student achievement, Hanushek then declares that several of the key methods used by school reformers to determine this — most-notably the teacher salary comparisons pioneered by Marguerite Roza and the Education Trust — offer little evidence that this is so.

Certainly the Roza model isn’t exactly foolproof. Some of the worst-performing school districts certainly have plenty of veteran teachers. Which is often as much a problem in those districts as having far too many inexperienced teachers. Considering that just 1.4 percent of tenured teachers are ever dismissed for performance issues (and less than seven-tenths of one percent of newly-hired instructors are ever fired), the veteran status of teachers merely means they have avoided felonious activity and more-rigorous performance management. Additionally, as  Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen of the Center for Reinventing Public Education pointed out in their report, the average 25-year veteran is no more effective at improving student achievement than a teacher who has taught for four years.

But the Roza method does offer a  good starting point for measuring teacher quality among and within school districts. Why? Because the nature of the current teacher compensation system — in which teachers must earn years of seniority and numerous degrees before gaining high levels of salary and benefits — means that salary can be used to measure the number of newly-minted teachers in a school or district. Salary and experience are positively correlated (even if experience and teacher quality may not). As Hanushek concedes, there is correlation between the number of rookies on a teaching staff and the quality of instruction. I have used Roza’s basic method in my own work, most-notably in a 2006 editorial on improving teacher quality in Indiana’s poor urban schools.

Yet Hanushek fails to consider the fact that there are other ways of measuring teacher quality in urban schools which can stand scrutiny. This is something he should know quite well.

There are teacher absenteeism levels: For one, the higher the level of absenteeism, the more likely students are being taught by substitute teachers — who, no matter one’s views on credentials, are usually teaching out of field and thus providing lower-quality instruction; the measure may also show whether a large percentage of a teaching staff is coasting towards burnout. There is also the percentage of teachers with less than three-to-five years of experience; Hanushek already concedes that there is a correlation between number of rookie teachers and quality of classroom instruction.

Another is the percentage of teachers reassigned to new schools more than once every three years; this allows researchers to determine the percentage of teachers who are part of the notorious dance of the lemons that occurs between schools year after year. One could even use teacher test scores on such tests as the Praxis I — which is required in most states for initial certification — along with the percentage of teachers who have failed those tests and retake them for a second or third time.  As Katie Haycock of EdTrust (Hanushek’s foil in this debate) also points out, even the value-added assessment techniques Hanushek pioneered is offering new evidence that low-quality teaching is at the heart of urban school failure.

It is sad that Hanushek (and, to a lesser extent, Fordham Institute research czar Mike Petrilli) engage in the same sort of “magic bullet-shooting holes” argument that plagues so much of the education reform dialogue. Improving the quality of education for the poorest students requires high-quality reasoning and dialogue, along with high-quality research.

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Photo courtesy of Jose Vilson

While one appreciates Fordham’s Mike Petrilli for arguing that racial and ethnic integration in charter schools is as worthy a goal as it is in other aspects of American life,  there are a couple of problems with his overall argument.

The first? He involves a false assumption not based on evidence: That charter school operators aren’t necessarily interested in integration. This isn’t the case. If anything, as evidenced by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools President Nelson Smith’s response to Gary Orfield’s latest report decrying segregation in charters (or to be more precise, the latest study coming out of his Civil Rights Project at UCLA), charter school advocates definitely think integration is important. This is also true in the fact that most charters are open-enrollment, lottery-driven schools which are open to all comers so long as the children and the parents commit to being the active players in education decision-making they should be.

Petrilli also downplays the role of state charter legislation in fostering the segregation he and Orfield mutually decry. (It could be worse, of course: Orfield and company pretend this doesn’t even exist.) As I’ve noted, the likelihood of integration is as much dependent on the location- and demographic-based restrictions as it is on the choices of parents. As evidenced in Maryland and Virginia, the dual role of traditional districts as both public school operators and charter authorizers also means that charters are also less-likely to exist in suburban communities. Suburban districts abhor the presence of charters even more than their big-city counterparts. Until these barriers are eliminated, charter schools will continue to confined to the nation’s urban locales. And unless those cities manage to lure more whites from suburbia through sensible fiscal and quality-of-life policies, charters will also remain highly-segregated.

Certainly integration is a great benefit, both to society and to the people on an individual level. After all, I’ve spent most of my career arguing for a color-blind society and even, demanding that my fellow African-Americans stop placing themselves into ghettos intellectual and otherwise. Petrilli is correct in noting that, depending on the setting, integration can even help improve student academic achievement (as well as, to borrow from J. William Fulbright, promote mutual understanding). Eliminating restrictions on the growth of charters would greatly aid that goal. So would the expansion of school voucher plans, the abolition of intra-district zoning  and magnet school policies, the promotion of inter-district public school choice (by making school funding a state-level role), and even the expansion of grassroots groups aiding parents in education, be it the Black Star Project or the PTA.

But integration isn’t the only social good. More important to black and Latino families — especially my own — are opportunities to provide the best education for their children. Given the low graduation rates for blacks and Latinos — and the consequences of mass academic failure wrought upon these communities — integration becomes a secondary priority. These families can no longer wait for the benefits of integration, wonderful and enriching as they are, as their young men and women struggle in traditional public schools that treat them as afterthoughts.  They want — and deserve — the power to choose better options.

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The Assembly chamber isn't the only thing empty when it comes to school reform. Photo courtesy of the New York Times.

What’s happening in the dropout nation after the AFC and NFC title games:

1. Opponents of standardized testing tend to think that there is little value to subjecting students (and teachers and school districts) to exams. But, as reported at Miller-McCune, testing is valuable in improving student learning (as well as proving valuable in tracking their academic progress).
2. It wasn’t unsurprising last week when New York State’s Democratic-led legislature failed to the pass legislation eliminating restrictions on growth of charter schools. What may be more surprising, as the Daily News reports, is that 49 percent of legislators received part of their education in private schools. Essentially, a good number of Empire State politicians denied to poor children the access to high-quality education they themselves received. Hypocritical. But, as we’ve seen inside the Beltway with the shuttering of the D.C. voucher program, not shocking.
3. When it comes to education reform, India and the United States aren’t far apart, according to Tom Vander Ark.
4. The Gates Foundation hands off $10 million to Denver’s traditional school district, according to the Denver Post. Whether this is a smart move or an Annenberg-like miscue? A different story.
5. Collin Hitt of the Illinois Policy Institute gives some perspective on what may be a fascinating attempt at education reform by Rod Blajocevich’s successor, Pat Quinn.
6. Even more going on in Memphis, another potential hotspot for school reform. The traditional school district there is offering more-rigorous math classes in elementary school (albeit, unfortunately, at just a few of its schools) and preparing to offer International Baccalaureate classes, notes the Commercial Appeal‘s Jane Roberts. Now if the district can make this widespread. Meanwhile Richard Locker analyzes how Tennessee’s latest round of teacher evaluation reforms came to fore.
7. Fordham (or to be more-specific, Smooth Mike) wants to know if you think Race to the Top is a “rip-off”. Let them know through their poll. I have my thoughts — and you already know what they are.
8. And at Indianapolis blog, IPS B.S., teachers are debating whether the state’s proposed grade retention law is worthy of discussion. Many seem to think kids should be held back even earlier than the state suggests.
9. Finally, off-education: Get a good start this Monday. Listen to “Rip the Universe”, a song from one of my favorite bands, a Canadian group called Reverie Sound Revue. For something a little less modern, you can also go with The O’Jays‘ “Love Train”.

Don’t forget to check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, which focuses on the high cost of teacher compensation and tenure for America’s taxpayers — and how it will drive the efforts to revamp how teachers are paid and evaluated. Also read last week’s Dropout Nation articles, including Saturday’s This is Dropout Nation report on one of the nation’s worst school systems.

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