School Spending: $100 Billion Worth of Stories, April 2, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009

$100 Billion Worth of Stories

$100 Billion Worth of Stories

By Linda Perlstein, EWA public editor

In his March 10 speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama said, “My outstanding Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars. It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”
 

So I can’t tell you how excited I was when, on an Education Department conference call this month, Stephanie Banchero of the Chicago Tribune asked Duncan a question I had long tossed around in my muddled mind but never managed to articulate as well as she did. Given the emphasis among education reformers on evidence-based decision-making—on programs that “work”—Stephanie asked Duncan for the research behind the administration’s support for teacher merit pay and charter school expansion.

It came as no surprise that Duncan danced around Stephanie’s question. Nobody says it out loud, but here’s the feeling I get: We only want to implement proven strategies—except when we really like the strategy.

I wish that as reporters, we called people on this more often. (Story idea alert: Have you noticed who is going to be evaluating whether Roland Fryer’s cash-for-grades programs “work” in various cities? Roland Fryer!) I personally don’t have any problem with trying all manner of new initiatives, but then again, you’ve never seen me waving around the Russ Whitehurst Evidence-Based Practice Playbook.

Anyway. With more than $100 billion about to go toward education from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—or the stimulus, in plain English—we have lots of opportunities to think critically about education reform over the next two years. Here’s a grab bag of issues from the stimulus plan and President Obama’s recent remarks on education that I think are worthy of attention:

*Let’s start with pay for performance, which Obama emphasized in his March 10 speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The stimulus includes $200 million for the Teacher Incentive Fund, and rewarding teacher effectiveness has been named as one way for school systems to win part of the $5 billion Race to the Top fund. Frankly, this was a hot topic even before Inauguration. So it’s a good time to dig deep.

First, take a look at the way things are done now. Chances are teachers in your districts are still paid based on the old-fashioned scale, which accounts for years served and advanced degrees attained, and evaluated in often haphazard ways. Watch a teacher prepare for the lesson she knows will be the basis of her biannual evaluation. Explain who is evaluating her, how often that person has seen the teacher in action, and what eventually happens, or doesn’t, with the information from the evaluation.

Second, look ahead to a world where teacher pay is based in part on student test scores. Rather than simply quoting union officials on why merit pay is more complicated than it sounds, go into schools and report on what exactly would need to happen to change the system. Take one school and see how many teachers do and do not teach subjects that are on the state’s standardized test. Show the impact other teachers besides the classroom teacher have on various students. (Are kids pulled out for interventions? Do teachers teach reading skills outside the primary classroom, and therefore have a role in a student’s success?) On a broader scale, what would your state and districts need to do to even be able to track this sort of data?

Third, if your state or district uses merit pay, do your colleagues a favor and try to determine the ways it may or may not have helped student achievement so far.

*When it comes to spending more than $100 million,will speed trump effectiveness? In a conference call this week, Duncan said that states would be considered for the Race for the Top money later only if they use stabilization funds in innovative ways now. No more status quo. But who is poised to attempt immediate innovation, when districts need the money just to stay afloat? Will such an emphasis favor quick-hit fads over meaningful reforms? Sit with district and state officials as they meet to decide where money will go and why. Are the funds going toward doing things differently—really differently—or will it be used in the same old ways? Even if you can’t sit in those meetings, you can ask that question.

 * The stimulus requires states to address the inequitable distribution of experienced, qualified teachers. The idea, Duncan adviser Marshall Smith told Education Week, is not for “dramatic change overnight” but rather for states “to begin to address it in a thoughtful way.” No Child Left Behind contained the same requirement, however—and it was ignored. So what’s going to be different now? Ask top teachers what it would take to get them to move into high-poverty schools. Even better, consider that redistribution means that weaker teachers shifted out of the neediest schools would have to go somewhere; ask principals in more affluent schools whether they are willing to take them in.

*Obama called for "standards and assessments" mandate that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity.” Ask your state’s testing director and other psychometricians whether, and how, such skills can be measured—a lemonade-stand task, perhaps?—and what it would take to remake an entire testing system to meet that mandate.

 
* Does providing $54 billion in fiscal stabilization funds to plug holes in state budgets provide a perverse incentive to keep state funding low? Can the kind of reforms that truly improve student learning in the long term be accomplished with only two years’ worth of funds? How much can assessments and data systems really be upgraded in two years?

* Will states get rewarded with Race to the Top money for raising standards and tracking students yet still be able to set targets so low that it takes remarkably little for children to be deemed proficient? You can write a challenging test, but if you only have to answer 10 questions out of 100 correct to pass, it doesn’t tell us much.

* Obama said the administration would be “building on” the work of South Carolina’s Teacher Advancement Program. TAP is active in 14 states; go take a look. Likewise, Obama plans to fund nurses’ home visits to new families. Katherine Boo wrote about this type of program three years ago in the New Yorker, and the Nurse-Family Partnership now operates in 28 states. Visit some families so readers can draw their own conclusions.

* I think Obama’s goal of having the top college graduation rate in the world by 2020 is pretty cool (if a tad ambitious: think 100 percent NCLB proficiency by 2014). But his plea for everyone to get one year of college or work training? That was sort of weird. Because what does exactly one year of college get you? My 31-year-old brother would tell you: not much. I’d love to see a story about what just one year of higher education means to workers—and employers—in the real world.

* With the government about to spend $500 million a year on college access and completion for low-income students, it’s a great time to lay out the problem: Barely half of American students get their bachelor’s degrees in six years, and among low-income or minority students the rate is considerably lower. It’s also a great time to document programs that seem to help, since they may win funds or serve as models to replicate.

* Do you live in a state with a strict cap on charters, which Obama would like to lift? If you are able to write a big-picture piece, consider this question that Russ Whitehurst posed in a Brookings Institution commentary: Insofar as charters are effective, would they be so if there were far more of them? Is there a big enough supply of the kind of top-tier, preternaturally energetic administrators and teachers they thrive on?         

* In his education speech, Obama highlighted student data tracking systems in Houston; Long Beach, Calif.; and Florida. Reporters in those places, please tell the rest of us: Are those systems worthy models? What have been the costs, and the benefits?

* Do you cover a district that receives Impact Aid because of nearby military bases, Indian reservations or other federal properties? If so, keep an eye on how stimulus money is being allocated there. According to some reports, Impact Aid funds will be free from the kind of restrictions that will be placed on other stimulus spending.

* Finally, during that conference call, Duncan said that “the idea of doing stuff with people instead of to them is very important”that teachers must be involved in decision-making. I’d love to see how many teachers were involved in the decisions made so far, and whether they’ll be included as the feds, states, districts and schools figure out how to spend all this money.

Linda Perlstein is available to help you. Contact her at lperlstein@ewa.org or 410-539-2464.