Tag: Cato Institute


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Read: Diane Ravitch Department


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What’s on the minds of the dropout nation today: Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is certainly getting heavy play. Honestly, the…

We need more black men like Roy Jones of Call Me MISTER to work with young black men and keep them on the path to graduation and college completion. Let's make it happen.

What’s on the minds of the dropout nation today:

  1. Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System is certainly getting heavy play. Honestly, the book is just a step above bargain bin material from my perspective. Others feel the same way:  Cato Institute education czar Andrew Coulson notes that Ravitch offers little in the way of cogent policy analysis. She can’t comment on charter schools or vouchers because she’s education historian, not a policy analyst or a researcher of any kind. Declares he: “They should never have been given credence in the first place.” Although I will state that Coulson’s argument is a bit faulty (based on his theory, most school reformers also wouldn’t qualify), he is right to state clearly what should be known by now: Ravitch is the Evan Bayh of education policy.
  2. Orestes Brownson is even more dismissive of Ravitch than Coulson or I would be. He also gives school reformers some grief: “One wishes, in vain, that education reformers would take their noses out of the test score tables and draft curriculae and talk about whether parents have a right to educate their children as they see fit… or not.” Understandable point, although I would argue that it isn’t exactly an either or. Parents should have the right to send their children to any high-quality educational options. At the same time, letting parents send children to failing schools is as much neglectful (and, dare I say, abusive) as physical abuse. There is a reasonable balance between anything goes and absolute restriction. Common core standards, from my perspective, seems unnecessary. Why? Because the National Assessment of Educational Progress already does a fine job of setting the bar for where states should be in terms of standards.
  3. For a masterful historian on education, one need not go to Ravitch. There is Jeffrey Mirel, whose treatise on the failings of the comprehensive high school system should be widely read by those interested in why high schools need reform (and why ability tracking should be abandoned altogether). His book on the history of Detroit’s public schools system should also be read. One need not agree with all of his conclusions in order to appreciate his scholarship.
  4. As Dropout Nation readers know, long-term pension and retiree health benefits and the evidence that seniority doesn’t equal quality are the two main forces that may lead to the end of traditional teachers compensation. Another reason why: The civil rights movement, which is now beginning to fully understand the consequences of seniority-based job protections (and the damage of “last hired-first fired” policies) to low-income students. As reported last month by the Los Angeles Times, the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the L.A. Unified School District for laying off its young teachers (and by proxy, being contractually unable to replace them with experienced teachers who don’t want to teach in schools serving poor children). At Samuel Gompers Middle School, the principal there recruited a highly-talented team of young teachers just to see them laid off; the school now depends on a rotating team of lower-quality substitutes. If the ACLU succeeds, this will result in a shock to every urban school system in the nation. And the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers will find themselves even more on the defensive.
  5. In Tupelo, Miss., a group called 150 Men is teaming up with the local school district to mentor 150 young black male dropouts and get them back into school, according to WTVA. It is part of a larger effort by the district to get more black churches and fraternities to take the achievement gap and the dropout crisis as seriously as they took the fight against segregation five decades ago.
  6. John Fensterwald notes that a few parent groups are asking state officials about the use of the Parent Trigger and open enrollment rules that can now be used by parents to either restructure failing schools their children attend or move them to better-performing schools in the area  (whether in their home district or outside of it). The two promising moves can help improve the quality of education for the poorest children. But as Fensterwald points out, the state hasn’t given thorough guidance on the use of either one. By the way, check out the Dropout Nation Podcast on Parent Trigger for more perspective.
  7. The Common Core Standards initiative being headed up by the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers has its math and English standards for comment. Feel free to leave your comments. Checker Finn has already offered his.

Check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast on next steps for Race to the Top. And read this week’s report on the possible impact of the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights efforts.

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The Read: Teacher Pay Edition


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My recent report on the high cost of teacher retirement packages definitely struck a cord with some folks. Reason‘s Brian Doherty notes that the teacher pension and healthcare deficits are…

New solutions must be undertaken if we want high-quality teachers in the classroom, especially in order to turn around the nation's dropout factories.

How to pay for teachers? Certainly not by maintaining the status quo.

My recent report on the high cost of teacher retirement packages definitely struck a cord with some folks. Reason‘s Brian Doherty notes that the teacher pension and healthcare deficits are part of an even-larger problem of funding civil servant retirements. Neil McCluskey at Cato offer their own thoughts, based in part on his own fine study of teacher compensation.

Meanwhile a couple of readers didn’t fully understand the argument being made — that teachers, for all their complaints about low play and demands for “respect” (i.e. money) — are among the best-compensated and best-protected professions. Think about it: The average teacher in TK states will

All that said, teacher compensation is out of whack: The lack of strong, objective annual evaluation of performance means that highly-effective teachers are paid as well as teachers lagging in subject-matter competence and instructional talent. The compensation system rewards veteran teachers, regardless of their ability, even though teachers are most likely to be effective during their early years in the classroom.

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The Afternoon Read


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What’s going on inside — and outside — the dropout nation. Grad rate inflation: One out of every three California freshmen who made up the state’s original Class of 2007…

"Play 01" by RiShawn Biddle

"Play 01" by RiShawn Biddle

What’s going on inside — and outside — the dropout nation.

    1. Grad rate inflation: One out of every three California freshmen who made up the state’s original Class of 2007 likely dropped out, according to the state Department of Education. Sure, nine percent of them are considered “completers” or having gained a GED or a certificate of completion of some kind. Either way, the reality is they are dropouts and haven’t gotten a high-quality education. Meanwhile one out of every four students in L.A. Unified’s original class of 2007 failed to graduate. Just 6.5 percent of the original class of 2007 at the Animo charter high school run by Green Dot schools — whose battles with L.A. Unified over the former’s expansion is legendary — dropped out. But for federal reporting purposes, those numbers are meaningless: Based on the federal government’s more-inflated graduation rate calculation, nearly 80 percent of the Class of 2007 graduated. How nice. The Mercury-News has more on this.
    2. And for the Hoosiers out there: Here are the graduation rate stats for Indianapolis Public Schools and the state as a whole. Yes, the numbers are les miserables.
    3. Meanwhile, Dan Weintraub explains in Education Next how the Terminator was laid low by the state’s powerful teachers’ unions. For Sherman Dorn, an apparent skeptic about the role of teachers’ unions in state policymaking, this may serve as another example of how teachers’ unions skillfully work the corridors of the nation’s statehouses.
    4. Is improving the quality of America’s teaching corps the answer to improving education? I say it’s just one of the answers, but not the only one. And Mike Petrilli over at The Education Gadfly argues why it may not be the answer at all.
    5. Intra-ed policy dust-up: EdSector’s Kevin Carey and Neil McCluskey at Cato trade shots over the latter’s most recent policy brief. Carey insists that McCluskey exemplifies that there may be a “libertarian conspiracy” to end the nation’s public education system. McCluskey accuses him of engaging in a smear campaign. I’m just going to let these guys argue among themselves.
    6. Jay Greene explains why the No Child Left Behind Act isn’t, as opponents of the law claim, an unfunded mandate. Sample quote: “I do not believe that a single tenured teacher out of the more than 3 million teachers currently working in public schools has been fired, experienced a pay-cut, or otherwise been meaningfully sanctioned because of NCLB.” Good point.

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