1)  Robert J. Samuelson’s Willful Ignorance: Last month, Dropout Nation took historian Victor Davis Hanson and Washington Examiner columnist Eugene Kane to task for some rather thoughtless positions on the underlying causes of the nation’s educational crisis. This time around, Newsweek and Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson — a favorite of your editor during his high school and college years, and an otherwise eminent economics columnist — makes his own share of mistakes in his latest column analyzing school reform and the 2009 PISA results.

Certainly Samuelson is partly correct that education alone isn’t the only matter weighing down America’s economic growth; school reform will be only one of several solutions that must be taken — along with lowering the nation’s tax and regulation burdens, promoting free trade and dealing with the structural insolvencies of state and local governments — to improve the nation’s long term economic health. But Samuelson wrongly understates the importance of education in an increasingly global economy in which strong math and science skills are needed for even top-paying blue-collar jobs. The fact that the construction sector and the military — both former havens for dropouts — are tightening their own academic requirements.

Samuelson’s biggest mistake lies in his argument that American public education  is doing a good job in academic instruction. I know, readers, don’t laugh yet, he’s really serious about this. Forget for a moment that small matter of 1.3 million dropouts every year, the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data that shows achievement gaps between males and females at every race, ethnic and income level, or even the work by leading education scholars Paul Peterson and Eric Hanushek on the nation’s low math performance compared to the rest of the world. Let’s not even mention Education Trust’s recent analysis of results from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery.

How does Samuelson get to his conclusion? Simple. He  simply looks at the results for whites overall and declares that the schools and the kids are alright; basically, if not for those black and Latino kids (which, by the way, will make up the majority of American students by mid-century), we wouldn’t be undertaking all this needless and costly school reform. (Now you can laugh.) This argument shows that Samuelson failed to look at the 35-point gap in reading between males and females, and the fact that just 27 percent of American 15-year-olds score at the highest levels of proficiency on PISA (versus the 32 percent average among all countries whose students took PISA).

Meanwhile, Samuelson’s argument that the problem lies only with parents fails to consider the wide range of data that shows otherwise. More importantly, the argument fails to consider that there are some areas in  education which parents just aren’t fully equipped to handle. As the National Council on Teacher Quality notes, 40 percent of all kids will still need reading remediation, no matter how much their parents read at home. The fact that the areas of the brain devoted to reading develop more-slowly in boys than in girls  — and thus, explaining why boys fall behind in reading and academics — also means that there will be a need for reading help that parents aren’t going to be able to handle on their own.

The biggest problem with Samuelson’s piece is his argument for why school reform has been a rather slow affair. Until the past decade, most improvement efforts have either fallen apart or had little success because they didn’t address the four critical areas for reforming education: Overhauling how America recruits, trains and compensates teachers (including near-lifetime job protections in the form of tenure, which, unlike in higher education, don’t actually advance any kind of academic freedom and protect laggard teachers from termination); bringing college preparatory and other rigorous curricula to classrooms; expanding school options for families (especially those in urban communities) and engaging families in education beyond field trips and homework. Most of the reform efforts that are now showing success — notably charter schools — have only begun to gain traction in the past decade.

Teacher quality reform efforts, in particular, has only begun to gain traction. One reason: Value-added assessment of student test data only began in the 1980s; it is only in the past decade that value-added (along with the full regimen of standardized tests used in the analysis) have become widely-used among education researchers and some school systems. The other reason: Because it has taken a change in the political climate of education to begin addressing those issues. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 — with its Adequate Yearly Progress breakdowns of school performance by racial, ethnicity and gender — gave education researchers and school reformers the tools they needed to fully analyze the extent of problems within American public education. The research and evidence resulting from this work — including data showing the effects of seniority-based layoffs on teacher quality in the poorest urban schools — has provided the framework for the current solutions being discussed today.

And finally, it has taken the nation’s current economic downturn — and the long-term fiscal problems among states and school districts (in the form of more than $600 billion in teacher pension deficits and unfunded retiree health benefits) — to fully bring the school reform conversation into focus.  These conditions have weakened the influence of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — which successfully opposed stalled reforms at the local, state and national level (while striking deals to expand the array of degree- and seniority-based compensation, near-lifetime employment and defined-benefit retiree deals that have driven increases in school spending.

As an admirer of Samuelson, it pains me to tear into his analysis. In fact, I welcome anyone who is interested in what is happening in American public education; we need as many players from outside of the status quo as we can get. But Samuelson is a grown up; he can take it. More importantly, given his previous stab at analyzing school reform, his incorrect analysis needs to come under scrutiny. As I have with Hanson, I invite Samuelson to spend some time reading Dropout Nation and learning more about the systemic problems within American public education.

2) Why Education’s Status Quo Won’t Offer Meaningful Solutions on State Budget Cutting:  The dirty secret of life when you are in any status quo is that coming up with solutions to state fiscal crises means acknowledging that you are part of the problem. After all, all problems exist because of human action, especially if it involves state laws, bargaining agreements and other practices for which you have advocated that are contributing to the problem. The other dirty secret: Offering solutions also means hard conversations within your cohort and among your allies about who among you will bear the brunt of any solutions. If you are, say, a union whose rank-and-file include support employees (who are generally easily dispensable), you don’t want to lose the revenue (in the form of dues) that flow from their employment. If you are a university with a graduate school dependent on revenue tied to a group of workers gaining a professional credential in order to achieve pay raises, you will oppose any effort to cut that flow of dollars even if the value of the credential you give out is, at best, overstated.

Combine these self-interests with an underlying philosophical belief that the solution to issues lies with increasing revenue by any means necessary (be it increases in taxes or by siphoning funds from other areas of a government), and you have almost no reason to do anything other than criticize meaningful solutions (when they aren’t complaining about “draconian” cuts that aren’t exactly so).

Keep all this in mind when you read some polemic about budget-cutting from Diane Ravitch or Bruce Baker or the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. They have no interest in offering anything meaningful in discussing the current and long-term fiscal problems facing states and school districts.

The Mythologizing of Memory in Education Analysis (Or Why Victor Davis Hanson Gets It Wrong): One of the biggest problems in when it comes to education among most people is that they view schools through subjective memory, or what I call “the myth of the good ol’ days”. Because everyone has attended school at some point in their lives, they think that their experience is the norm when it is isn’t necessarily so. And if their educational experience was positive, they wax rhapsodic about a past without any basis in empirical evidence.

Washington Examiner pundit Gregory Kane — usually an intelligent commentator on most issues — made this mistake earlier this month in a piece in which he derided school reform efforts as being useless because the problem in his mind lies with what he considers to be, to paraphrase: ‘those knucklehead kids and their parents over there’. The otherwise eminent military historian Victor Davis Hanson makes the same mistake this week in a Pajamas Media piece. While declaring that he isn’t mythologizing the past, he proceeds to do exactly that by recalling his time attending high school in poor Latino neighborhoods where “the non-air-conditioned rooms were often over 90 degrees”, where “there was almost no violence on campus”, and poor students “arrived clean, polite, and ready to study”.

Given that most school data from before the 1980s is generally incomplete or non-existent, it’s hard for Hanson to actually prove his point. The closest thing to information on school crime can be gotten is a 1978 study by Robert Rubel that included surveys conducted by the National Education Association and no FBI crime data on school violence. Essentially, Hanson can’t make his case just on the evidence.

Given that he also grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California before its cities became mired in the typical problems of urban America, one would also say that his experience is in some ways an anomaly from what was happening at the same time in Harlem, L.A. (especially around Dodger Stadium and South Central L.A.), or even in the South Side of Chicago. In all three areas, gang crime was well-documented and growing problem.  Based on the history of those areas at the time — and of areas such as Levittown, N.Y., and other growing suburbs of the period, Hanson’s experience may be particular to his area, but not to the objective reality of what was happening throughout the nation. In fact, one would dare say objectively that there was no typical public school experience.

The other part is the reality that, as kids, we don’t know many of the students with whom we attend school. In fact, in most high schools, the kids in the AP classes are often unlikely to mix with the kids who are on the path to dropping out. Memory is faulty; it leaves out (and fails to consider) what is unseen. In short, to paraphrase legendary New York City Mayor Ed Koch, the good ol’ days were only in the mind. It’s why prosecutors and historians don’t rely just on only eyewitness testimony.

Meanwhile Hanson fails to even consider the four decades of research that shows that American public education is systemic failure, one that cannot be simply blamed on kids or parents. Based on current school discipline and juvenile justice data, schools don’t struggle with getting difficult students of all races (both real and perceived) out of schools. If anything, it’s too easy for schools to toss kids out.

Perhaps he can start with the work of Jonah Rockoff at Columbia University on teacher quality. Or read the L.A. Times‘ series on teacher quality in L.A. Unified Schools — including the analysis of school turnaround efforts at Edwin Markham Middle School. What Hanson would learn is that the problem isn’t the kids or even the parents (many of whom were taught at these same dropout factories, sometimes by the very same teachers), but with a system that protects laggard teachers at the expense of taxpayers, families and kids alike.

Which bring up another point (and this one is for both Kane and Hanson): Until recently, most reforms have either fallen apart or had little success because they didn’t address the three critical areas for reforming education: Overhauling how America recruits, trains and compensates teachers (including near-lifetime job protections in the form of tenure, which, unlike in higher education, don’t actually advance any kind of academic freedom and protect laggard teachers from termination); bringing college preparatory and other rigorous curricula to classrooms; and engaging families in education beyond field trips and homework. The fact that reformers have called for the end of tenure, for subjecting teachers to private sector-style performance management (including the use of student performance data in evaluations), and the push to replace degree- and seniority-based compensation is also why there has been so much rancor among the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and university schools of education. The latter are the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo and don’t want meaningful reforms that involve subjecting their Baby Boomer rank-and-file members (and their coffers) to real consequences.

Now, let’s give Hanson some credit on one thing: Parents most certainly need to set the  example of good discipline and good behavior for their kids. Leon Dash has documented the consequences of what can be called the lack of values among parents, relatives and other adults in communities. Schools can be safe havens for these kids; but these are also secondary roles and it’s the job of families to set good moral examples.

But as we’ve seen with the Knowledge is Power Program, Catholic schools and even the best traditional public schools, schools can often offset these negative influences by providing high quality teaching, rigorous instruction, caring teachers and principals who are also competent, entrepreneurial leaders, and cultures of genius in which all kids are held to high expectation. This isn’t happening throughout American public education. These  failures have almost nothing to do with the kids and with a system in which low-quality instruction, low-grade curricula, and a culture of mediocrity has been tolerated by teachers unions and other defenders of the status quo at the expense of the kids in their classrooms.

Your editor appreciates Hanson taking an interest in school reform. We need all hands on deck. But he would be better off ditching his memories (or putting them down into a novel) and looking for more-objective analysis on education issues. Dropout Nation can help him in this regard.

Why Curriculum Reform Isn’t Enough, Part XXX: Curriculum reform advocate Marion Brady graced the pages of your education news site last week in response to the reprint of my speech at the State of Black CT Alliance’s Building Blocks of Educational Excellence Event. In the comment section, Brady declared that the nation’s education crisis won’t be solved until today’s curriculum — what he calls a “19th Century relic, designed by 19th Century educators” — is ditched to the ashbin of history.

For one, Brady conveniently sidesteps the reality that it isn’t 19th century curricula — which included the college prep efforts of Harvard under Charles Eliot — that is the problem (by the way, Brady even fails to consider that the 1800s was not a period of universal agreement on curriculum). What kids are learning today isn’t even close to 19th century curricula (and one could also say that least 26 million kids would actually been well-served if they actually were required to read the typical regimen of Great Books and Latin lessons). If there is an important curriculum-based reason why American public education is in the toilet, that lies with ability tracking and the comprehensive high school model, both of which have dominated education for most of the last eight decades and have festered the culture of mediocrity, laggard curriculum and low expectations that have damned so many young men and women to poverty and worse.

The second problem with Brady’s argument (one he shares with Robert Pondisco of Core Knowledge) is arguing that reformers don’t focus on curriculum as part of their overhaul efforts. Last I checked, there are a number of outfits, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that are quite focused on curriculum and standards reform. But, as typical with nearly all reformers (and even those in the status quo), Brady apparently thinks they aren’t sufficiently focused on his respective bailiwick. Oh, well.

But the more-important problem with Brady’s argument lies with his conceit: That there is only one silver bullet for what ails public education. This thinking, a problem among many in the school reform movement, is especially an issue among the curriculum reform crowd (who may note the importance of improving teacher quality, but then dash past all that uncomfortable mess). Sure, curriculum is one of the most-critical elements of reforming American public education. But curriculum reform on its own isn’t enough. A rigorous math curriculum (including Algebra 1 courses in eighth grade and pre-calculus in ninth) will not improve student achievement if its taught by teachers lacking subject-knowledge competency, entrepreneurial drive and care for the kids they instruct. It’s akin to handing a Dremel (or even a high-end pneumatic die-grinder) to a first-time do-it-yourself-er. It’s this reality that explains why many school reformers are more-focused on teacher quality reform than on curriculum.

One appreciates Brady’s passion for improving education for all kids. His argument that curriculum should be more-reflective of what students will do in college and career in this century should be considered (even if you disagree with it). But he needs to realize that teacher quality reform and curriculum reform goes hand-in-hand. One won’t work without the other.

Watching how education policy will play out after Tuesday’s elections:

The Michael Bennet Question: Centrist Democrat school reformers cheered Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet’s apparent victory over Republican Ken Buck. Given the money that they handed over to him — including $11,000 from Democrats for Education Reform’s PAC alone — they should be happy. But here’s the thing: The National Education Association also poured $1.4 million into efforts to keep Bennet in office — and likely put a lot of bodies on the ground to help him out too. Given Bennet’s vague and short record on school reform (both as Denver’s school superintendent and in the Senate), can reformers actually count on him when push comes to shove? In politics (as in much of life), money and bodies talk; everything else walks. Bennet will definitely listen to the NEA leaders — and less so to his reform allies.

This leads to an important point for school reformers everywhere: It will take more money and more bodies on the ground in order to sustain the decade of  gains that have been made on the policy front. As weak as the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers may be (and will become), they still have both in spades. More importantly, the two unions have worked hard to build modestly successful alliances with other organizations in order to move their agenda (and to back-check those of the school reform movement). School reformers are slowly learning this lesson; the $3.5 million raised by DFER and Stand for Children proves that. But reformers are still too focused on working statehouse corridors and Capitol Hill; they must reach out and get to work in the grassroots to ensure long-term gains.

Will AYP Die?: A major fear among reformers is that the ascent of John Kline to the chairmanship of the House Education and Labor Committee will lead to the gutting of the Adequate Yearly Progress and other accountability provisions within the No Child Left Behind Act. Given Kline’s own statements, the focus of some House Republicans on a return to local control, Obama’s own “blueprint” for reauthorization of No Child, and the fervent longstanding opposition of teachers unions and suburban districts to any kind of accountability, the fear is understandable.

Yet, despite the carping from opponents of No Child and all the discussions about gutting it, nothing has happened. Why? For one, there remains a core group of influential reformers — including former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, congressmen on both sides of the aisle, and reform-minded governors, who know that AYP has done more to focus the nation on dealing with the widespread problems within American public education than any other policy decision in the past five decades. Reform-oriented governors, in particular, have successfully used AYP as cover to enact reforms that would otherwise be resisted by the status quo. Expect someone like a Mitch Daniels (who may run for the Republican presidential nomination) to privately remind Kline and his colleagues of this.

Also, any effort to eliminate AYP will open up a hornet’s nest of issues. For one, the feds spend more than $150 billion a year on education; how can this money be spent without any accountability whatsoever? In fact, one reason why AYP was created was to finally bring some check and balance to how school districts and states spent federal money after decades of getting so much cash and showing no results for it. The only way to truly end accountability is to eliminate federal spending altogether; given that suburban school systems such as those in Kline’s district — along with state coffers — depend on Title I money — the latter isn’t going to happen. And the congressional Republicans can’t get rid of accountability without looking rather, umm, fiscally unconservative and profligate.

Any effort to gut AYP will also involve coming up with compromise version of No Child. Considering that the GOP is looking to give Obama as few victories as possible — and that Republicans themselves are as divided on school reform as their Democratic colleagues — this isn’t likely to happen. What is more likely is a stalemate between the leaderships in both houses and Obama (who may find it to be a good idea to drop the entire idea of eliminating accountability as a way to rally reformers among his base).

Finally, Common Core State Standards expands the need for accountability. After all, what is the point of developing national curriculum standards if states and school districts don’t fully enact them? Although the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (whose contradictory support of Common Core and opposition to No Child is an interesting dance) has argued that this can be done through a nonprofit national board, it isn’t going to work — especially since the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (which developed Common Core) don’t want to give up their roles as its guardians. Essentially, Common Core calls for a more-expansive role for the U.S. Department of Education and greater accountability.

In short, AYP may die — and still end up remaining alive and stronger than ever. Long live AYP!

Photo courtesy of Foster's Daily Democrat

The loss of the House by congressional Democrats offers some silver linings for centrist and progressive reformers: With New Hampshire Democrat Carol Shea-Porter’s loss, there is one less opponent to school reform on the House Education and Labor Committee. Same with Nevada’s Dina Titus, a critic of the No Child Left Behind Act, is also out (albeit, her victorious opponent supports moving back to local control).  Rep. Judy Chiu, whose opposition to Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind Act has made her one of the most-bellicose school reform critics, will also have a less-powerful voice. No more David Obey on Appropriations doing the bidding of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. And Jared Polis, who easily won a second term, will now be in position to shape congressional Democrat policy on education towards a direction more-fitting to the Obama agenda.

What the midterm elections could mean for school reform:

The Democratic Party’s Civil War Over School Reform Continues: As far as both centrist Democrat school reformers and the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are concerned, the midterm elections end up as a draw of sorts. The Democratic Party’s loss of the House of Representatives (along with heavy losses in the Senate)  essentially means that neither side will advance their diverging agendas. One could argue that the teachers unions will make a slight gain only because Republicans such as likely House Education and Labor Committee chairman John Kline will work hard to gut the No Child Left Behind Act — including the accountability provisions that include Adequate Yearly Progress measurements.

But in the long run, the NEA and AFT are running scared. The fact that so many Democrats lost despite the $24 million spent by both unions on their behalf in the last week (and $40 million by the NEA alone this year) is one more sign that the NEA and AFT are no longer useful to the party. That President Obama’s school reform agenda remains the only popular aspect of an overall agenda that has been largely rejected by voters this year — along with the fact that reform-oriented candidates such as Joe Manchin and Chris Coons have won their respective races — also means that the two unions will have fewer supporters inside the party ranks.

Then there is the other reality: Centrist and progressive Democrat school reformers believe that education is the most-important civil rights issue of this era. And as University of Arkansas researcher Sandra Stotsky points out, is improving teacher quality — the most-important factor in improving education — is as much a civil rights issue as the rest of the education agenda. But the NEA and the AFT are the biggest obstacles to the much-needed overhauls in teacher recruitment, training and compensation that are critical to the school reform agenda. These realities and conflicts in visions all but guarantee more in-fighting within Democrat ranks for years to come.

The Republican Infighting Over School Reform Has Just Begun: As I noted in my American Spectator column last month, Kline’s ascent into the House Education and Labor Committee chairmanship won’t be nearly as pleasing to conservative and libertarian school reformers as they may think. If Kline eliminates AYP, he has essentially eliminated a tool that has so much to shed light on the woeful condition of American public education. His reticence about using federal power to push for the expansion of charter schools also bodes poorly for school choice supporters, who have been able to count on Congress and the last two presidents to advance their cause. Don’t expect the GOP to offer up a D.C. Opportunity Scholarship-style voucher plan or a Race to the Top-style effort to expand charter schools.

Expect a clash within the congressional Republican camp as reform-minded conservatives of the standards-and-accountability bent (including soon-to-be speaker John Boehner, who helped usher in No Child when he was education committee chairman) battle over policy with the Kline camp (who represent suburban districts that have long-opposed reform efforts) and movement conservatives with small government leanings and a desire to dial back federal policy in all areas. Also expect reform-minded Republican governors (many of whom have successfully used No Child and Race to the Top) to advance their agendas to also voice their objections to Kline’s local control-oriented agenda. No matter how you look at it, education may prove almost as vexing for Republicans as it is for Democrats.

A Mixed Story at the State Level: It depends on the state and even the region. With school reform-oriented Republicans gaining control of Indiana’s lower house, expect the state’s school superintendent, Tony Bennett, to push for additional reforms on the teacher quality front and an expansion of charter schools throughout the state. In the southern states, it’s a mixed story: In Nathan Deal, Georgia gets another governor with almost no interest in embracing either charters or taking on tenure (not that the losing candidate, former governor and onetime reformer Roy Barnes, would have made a difference). As Dropout Nation noted on Monday, school reform advocates in other southern states ( with the exception of Florida, Louisiana and possibly, South Carolina) will struggle to gain traction.

California will be an interesting situation. With once-and-future governor Jerry Brown succeeding the reform-minded Arnold Schwarzenegger, one wonders if the state will retrench from its spate of Race to the Top-driven efforts. At the same time, Democrats for Education Reform has recruited outgoing state senator Gloria Romero — an architect of the state’s parent trigger law — to lead their grassroots advocacy efforts in the Golden State. Then there is also the continuing reform activity within the L.A. Unified School District.

No matter what happens, the next two years will be interesting indeed.