On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how parents can use five new questions to spur reform of American public education and improve schools for their children step by step. By asking the right questions — including about math instruction and school discipline policies –  parents can change the way their kids are taught each and every day.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

The High Cost of Teacher Pensions: Congressional Republican Edition: As I’ve noted for the past two years, the struggle among states to deal with the more than  $600 billion in pension deficits and retired teacher healthcare costs will be the single-biggest driving force in reforming American public education. But it will only happen once states start dealing honestly with these burdens (along with their overall insolvency). Reforming the lavish system of defined-benefit pensions, degree- and seniority-based pay, near-lifetime employment and abysmal performance management is one step. The other, as pointed out by the  Manhattan Institute and  Northwestern University Associate Professor Joshua Rauh, is to deal honestly with the actual deficits. This includes reporting accurate numbers and assuming conservative and realistic investment rates of return. Save for New Jersey and occasional efforts in New York and Vermont, most states have been unwilling to do the latter.

But soon, states may be forced to deal realistically with the insolvency thanks not to the Government Accounting Standards Board (which has done an admirable job of forcing states to finally admit to their retiree healthcare deficits), but to congressional Republicans, who take control of the House of Representatives in the next month. As Slate‘s David Weigel notes, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) will chair a House Oversight subcommittee that will investigate nation’s public pensions who have participated in the massive federal bailout related to the financial meltdown two years ago. One of the things McHenry plans to crib off New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s playbook and battle with the nation’s teachers and public employee unions. One way to do this: Demanding  state governments  to be more-transparent about the extent of their public employee costs — especially teacher pensions and healthcare costs.

McHenry’s colleagues have already begun the battle this month with the introduction of the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act, which would force states to fully publicize their actuarial assumptions and deficits beyond the usual tiny print in voluminous (and often year-late) pension annual reports. While the law had no chance of passing this time around, the prospects of similar legislation coming down the pipe in January has the public sector unions and pension systems on the defensive.  On this front, they will likely get help from school reform-minded congressional Democrats such as Jared Polis and cheerleading from their allies among such school reform think tanks such as the Education Sector (which issued its own analysis of the nation’s teacher pension crisis earlier this year).

The efforts by McHenry certainly presents a major philosophical conundrum for congressional Republicans: On the one side, you have a committee chairman in the form of House Education and Labor Committee Chairman John Kline who is arguing for a scale-back in federal education policy (except when it doesn’t suit the suburban districts among his constituency), and a return to a mythic version of local control. This would essentially mean that the feds would also take no action on solving the teacher pension crisis. On the other hand, Kline’s colleague McHenry is actually arguing for a more expansive role in regulating teacher pensions (along with other public pensions and civil servant benefits), which means a more-activist role for the feds — especially for the departments of education and labor, which will be the agencies that handle the actual oversight.

This isn’t a surprise. For one, Republicans conveniently demand both scaled-back and more-expansive federal policy when it suits them. More importantly, given the party’s general divide between movement conservatives, leave-us-alone libertarians, suburban centrists and Joe Scarborough-style moderates (and its even more fractious divisions over school reform), there will be moments in which policy goals clash. One must also keep in mind the diverging interests between congressional Republicans and their gubernatorial counterparts (who want a stronger federal role in order to force the reforms they support). This could lead to a clash between Kline and McHenry over pensions because of the contrasting philosophies, and the fact that McHenry (along with the Budget and Oversight Committee’s overall chairman, Darrell Issa) is also crossing into Kline’s territory on what is in many ways an Education and Labor Committee issue.

More on the Hollywood Model: What is Happening: Last week, Dropout Nation looked at the debate in Memphis over whether the district would hand over its charter to the state and essentially merge itself with the smaller Shelby County district. On Tuesday, the board voted to put the question before the voters, offering an opportunity for Tennessee state officials to step in and actually consider essentially turning every school in the combined district into charters. Such a move would certainly be better than the current academic state of affairs for the two districts, neither of which are doing all that well in providing high-quality education to the kids in their care.

Meanwhile a school district in tiny Elkton, Ore., may be paving the way for the future for many rural districts: Converting its schools from traditional districts to charters. In the last year, Elkton ditched its traditional district model of school operations and took advantage of the flexibility given to charters under state law. In the process, Elkton essentially becomes a competitor to five other districts in the area, offering students in those districts new educational options that may fit their needs. While others in the state argue for consolidations of rural districts, the history of such efforts have shown that bigger isn’t essentially better when the underlying (and antiquated) organizational structures are failing students and taxpayers alike. And as online options and more charters come down the pipe, the idea of merely patching up the school district model of education will go the way of using hand-cranks to start car engines.

And in Louisiana, state Superintendent Paul Pastorek has gained approval for his plan for the future of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, which includes allowing the schools to either stay under oversight of the state-run district or fall under the watchful eye of the old New Orleans school system. This is an important step toward making the Hollywood Model of Education real. Why? Because the New Orleans district can only gain oversight over the  schools if they are allowed to run in “21st century manner”, that is, the district will only serve in an oversight role similar to what the state would do instead of operating schools. The Recovery District schools, on the other hand, will operate on their own. Essentially, Orleans Parish wouldn’t be able to go back to mismanaging schools; given the district’s lack of capacity, it is also unlikely.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain what it should mean for education to be the leading civil rights issue of this era. School reformers and others make this statement every day, but it will be meaningless jargon unless several steps are taken to walk the proverbial talk.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

Since taking office as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction two years ago, Tony Bennett has managed to make the kind of meaningful changes in reforming how the Hoosier State recruits and trains teachers — including requiring ed schools to screen out laggard aspiring teachers by using the Praxis I exam — that his predecessor, Suellen Reed, never deemed worth doing in her 16 years in office. This, along with his defense of the state’s charter schools from efforts to essentially abolish them, has certainly angered the state’s educational ancien regime. But it has also made him one of the more-fervent school reform-oriented state school chief executives — a role that will become more prominent as Indiana’s governor and state legislature consider a new round of reform initiatives in a state that dearly needs them.

In this Three Questions, Bennett — who will be coming to D.C. next week to speak  on an American Enterprise Institute book panel, offers a few thoughts on reforming American public education on the ground. Read and consider.

What is the one surprising thing you have learned during your tenure as Indiana’s superintendent from public instruction and how has it shaped your work and thinking?

It is surprising to me how infrequently children are the focus of conversations regarding education reform. Too often, the focus is on how change will affect adults in the system and not on how changes will benefit our students.  This inspired me, early on, to make putting kids first our top priority—and I look at everything through that lens.
What is the one thing school reform activists inside the Beltway don’t consider in their policy discussions and proposals and why?

Much of what we’re trying to do in Indiana aligns with federal policymakers’ vision for education reform. But specifically, I’d like it if the policymakers and leaders in D.C. removed as much of the bureaucratic red tape as possible.  I’d like to see them get rid of the superfluous reporting requirements that have nothing to do with educating children and instead pull educators away from focusing on their core mission to teach kids. In this regard, I think the feds have good intentions, but it’s difficult for them to envision how data and reporting requirements handcuff us at the state and local level.

What are the most-critical next steps that Indiana will need to take in order to improve the quality of teachers in classrooms? What are the challenges?

Our agenda is four-pronged: 1. Increase flexibility so that school corporations can meet the needs of their students. 2. Increase options for all students. 3. Increase accountability. 4. Recognize and reward great teachers.  Key in achieving these will be making sure teacher and leader evaluations are multi-faceted and fair—and can consider student achievement growth, which is currently prohibited by state law.   We must also work to ensure pay and promotion are based on factors other than seniority and degrees held. We need to make sure every parent has access to high-quality educational options for their child. Finally, we must act with fierce urgency to make all these changes now to benefit students—especially in our chronically underperforming school buildings.

The biggest challenges we face is opposing adult interests that seek to maintain the ineffective status quo.

How do you think charter schools will further reshape Indiana’s education landscape? What steps will you take to ensure that charters are of high-quality?

Charters are a powerful piece in our efforts to increase high-quality educational options for all students.  We have to provide a more hospitable environment for charters to develop.  And I believe charters should be held to the same high standards to which we hold traditional public schools.  If they aren’t demonstrating student growth and quality education, they should be closed.

As you head into the weekend, listen in on this rebroadcast of this Dropout Nation Podcast on how to improve education for their children through a few simple questions. Even as school reform has provided new tools for parents, they still need ways to use them for the advantage of their children. Asking the right questions will give caring adults the ability to improve education for their child and for all children — and further sustain school reform.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone.  Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. Also, add the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.

Sunday’s Dropout Nation Podcast will focus on dealing with the reading challenges for our young men.

Percentage of American 12th-graders in 11 states who tested Below Basic proficiency on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were released today.

26

Percentage of American 12th-graders reading Below Basic on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Just one-fifth of high school seniors read at levels of functional illiteracy 17 years earlier.

31

Percentage of 12th-grade males reading Below Basic, a six percent increase over the level in 1992;  just 20 percent of their female counterparts read at levels of functional illiteracy; a four percent increase since 1992.

51

Percentage of black male 12th-graders reading Below Basic on NAEP; that’s 15 percent higher than the number of black females reading Below Basic — and the highest level of illiteracy among all racial/ethnic gender groups.

0

Number of states that had fewer than one-fifth of its high school seniors perform Below Basic on the math portion of NAEP.

1

The only state — South Dakota — which had fewer than 20 percent of its 12th-graders read Below Basic on NAEP. (18 percent of the Mount Rushmore state’s students read at levels of functional illiteracy.)

Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.

These are tough issues. Rethinking the status quo, by definition, can be unsettling. But I know that these discussions will be taking place in the coming year in schools, in districts, in union headquarters, in statehouses, and the governor’s mansion. The alternative is to simply end up doing less with less. That is fundamentally unacceptable.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, proclaiming during yesterday’s American Enterprise Institute conference that the status quo in American public education has to change. Well, it needs more than that: A revolution, not an evolution.

The End of Ed Schools — and Professional Development?: When it comes to training teachers and improving their skills, this is clear:  The nation spends a lot on it ($7 billion alone on training aspiring teachers); there are a lot of ed schools involved in handling this work (1,200 of them); professional development can be profitable for the players who provide it (including consultants like “culture of poverty” promulgator Ruby Payne, and ed schools); and the results are atrocious. Forget the low quality of instruction in our nation’s schools and a dropout crisis which saps the futures of 1.3 million kids every year: Teachers, administrators  and policymakers alike don’t even think the training is of any value.

The critical reason is that teacher training and professional development is garbage in, garbage out and garbage in-between. Former Teachers College President Arthur Levine pointed out in a 2006 study that 54 percent of the nation’s teachers are taught at colleges with low admission requirements. Once aspiring teachers are admitted, they’re not likely to get the training they need to get the job done. As the National Council on Teacher Quality noted in its recent study, just one in five of the 53 ed schools it surveyed in Illinois adequately trained their students in reading instruction, and only five schools had strong, rigorous undergraduate elementary school instruction. Many ed school professors think they don’t have an obligation to actually ensure that teachers have strong subject knowledge competency or skill in instructional methods (much less actually have entrepreneurial drive, strong leadership ability and care for all kids); they would rather focus on theories of learning that involve some vague notions about schools as democracies instead of teaching teachers how to teach. The fact that Jason Kamras’, John Taylor Gattos and Jaime Escalantes emerge from the muck and mire is more a testament to their fortitude than to the ed schools from which they graduated.

Meanwhile the professional development is well, abysmal. Just 132 of 1,200 professional development programs surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education focused on reading, math and science; only nine actually met federal What Works Clearinghouse standards for quality and outcomes. Meanwhile there is little evidence that site-based professional development teams — in which teams of teachers meet to brainstorm and learn from one another — works either. Which makes sense: If America’s teacher corps is largely mediocre, then all you have happening is laggard teachers learning from other laggards. Meanwhile the one area of professional development that doesn’t really get called that — graduate and post-graduate training by ed schools — essentially functions as a way for teachers to take advantage of degree-based pay scales. If the ed school did a poor job of training teachers at the undergrad level, then it won’t do such a hot job in post-grad.

So should we save ed schools or professional development. The organization that is supposed to ensure that teacher training is of high quality, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, declared this week in its report that ed schools must move to a “clinical practice” model that emphasizes mentoring by experienced teachers. As reported by Education Week in its special report on professional development, there are new and novel efforts going on to improve post-graduate teacher training. This is all nice. But it may be too little too late.

For example, the NCATE study suggests that ed schools should work with traditional school districts — especially urban systems — to develop training programs that actually match their needs. Ed schools have called for this for years to no avail. Some have already begun to move on from ed schools, working with outfits such as Urban Teacher Residency United and The New Teacher Project to form their own training programs. Suburban and rural districts, who struggle with the same issues, could begin doing so as well. Just imagine if consortia of districts or even, say, states such as California, Nevada and Arizona teamed up with a Teach For America to do mass-scale teacher training? One could also imagine groups of high-quality teachers developing apprenticeship programs of their own independent of teachers unions, districts and ed schools, taking aspiring teachers under their wing and having them work in classrooms; this throwback to the old guild concept would certainly work better than the high-cost system in place today. Such efforts, along with private-sector run teacher training courses, could be the wave of the future.

Sure, as NCTQ President Kate Walsh points out, ed schools train more than 90 percent of all new teachers. But at this point, there are only a few ed schools — notably Teachers College — that deserve the name.  If the rest were shut down and replaced with alternative certification programs, American public education wouldn’t be any worse for wear. In fact, we may actually get better teachers and better schools. As for the professional development? What is needed is something better than the status quo.

Why House Republicans May Not Be So Good for the NEA and AFT After All: Soon-to-be House Education and Labor Committee Chairman John Kline’s opposition to the accountability elements of the No Child Left Behind Act have certainly garnered headlines. But one aspect of his agenda that hasn’t given much attention is his general opposition to near-lifetime employment for teachers in the form of tenure. While Kline is certainly arguing for a return to local control, he is also supportive of President Barack Obama’s efforts to reform teacher quality. So one could expect one part of Obama’s blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act — requiring the use of student test scores and other data in teacher evaluations — to actually pass the House in the form of a separate bill. This step would begin clearing the way for states to move in the direction that Colorado has taken and end teacher tenure altogether.

This does create a conundrum for congressional Republicans such as Kline, which have railed against expansive federal policy especially in education. But as I have pointed out last month in The American Spectator, Republicans have been rather flexible in their opposition to strong federal education policy. From launching the committee that wrote the pioneering school reform report A Nation at Risk, to creating the now-defunct D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, to the passage of No Child itself, Republicans are no more interested in small government except when it suits. This is also true now: Kline likely opposes AYP because it exposes the failings of suburban districts such as the ones in his congressional district. Requiring the use of test scores in teacher evaluations, on the other hand, only hits teachers and their NEA and AFT representatives (the latter of which will not like the idea of losing bodies, the very source of their revenue).

More importantly, Kline and other congressional Republicans will get pressure from reform-minded GOP governors, who appreciate the cover No Child and other federal laws give them cover for taking on reforms of their liking. Teacher quality is already on the mind of one possible (but unlikely) presidential aspirant, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels; Kline will listen and behave accordingly. At the same time, weakening the NEA and AFT is something that would play well to movement conservatives and others who generally oppose unions — and also find favor with centrist Democrat and progressive reformers who have equal disdain for the unions.

There are also other aspects of the NEA and AFT agenda — including items that have little to do with education policy — that will be affected by a House Republican majority. The Employee Free Choice Act, whose consideration had stalled under House Democrat leadership, will whither and die under GOP control. Also unlikely to be considered: Any efforts to spur a federal bailout of woefully insolvent public defined-benefit pensions — including even more-underfunded pensions for teachers. There could end up being an investigation of union-managed health insurance funds such as the now-insolvent fund managed by the NEA’s Indiana affiliate, opening up a new can of worms. And don’t expect another Edujobs-style effort to stem teacher layoffs; Kline opposed the $10 billion effort the last time around and considering his more-powerful position, the Obama administration won’t even bother.

Essentially the NEA and AFT may be somewhat happy with the presence of Kline — and that’s only if he can somehow weaken AYP.

U.S. spending on criminal justice in 2006-2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics; prisons and jails accounted for just 33 percent of the total.

$562 billion

U.S. education expenditures in 2006-2007, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Current K-12 spending accounts for $477 billion or nearly the entire total.

$1.5 billion

Amount spent on prison construction in 2006-2007. It accounts for less than 1 percent of criminal justice spending.

$63 billion

Amount spent on school construction in 2006-2007. It accounts for 11 percent of overall education spending and 13 percent of K-12 spending.

Earlier this month, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous declared that the civil rights group’s Gates Foundation-sponsored education agenda would include a focus on moving spending away from prisons and incarceration to what he declared to be an underfunded K-12 education system. But as the statistics show, education spending outpaces criminal justice spending by a two-to-one margin — and school construction funding outpaces prison construction spending by more than 40-to-1.

As Dropout Nation noted this past January, the reality isn’t so much that the America doesn’t spend too much on prisons or that too much is spent on education. It’s that the country spends far too much on both inefficiently and ineffectively. We spend $228 billion on criminal justice badly largely because we spend $562 billion on education abysmally. So long as we continue a status quo in American public education that would best comparable to medical malpractice, millions of our kids will end up behind bars.

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I issue a call to black men of character everywhere to stem the dropout crisis among our young black men. A look at new data — including a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools — paints a picture of despair and opportunities to rebuild Black America by reforming American public education and our communities.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod, Zune, MP3 player or smartphone. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network,  Zune Marketplace and PodBean. And the podcast on Viigo, if you have a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android phone.