redefinED

Jobs on education: We’ve forgotten that the customers are the parents

By Adam Emerson on October 21, 2011

The Huffington Post got a copy of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs, focusing particularly on a revealing conversation between Jobs and President Obama. In his meeting with the president, during which he said Obama was “headed for a one-term presidency,” Jobs criticized America’s education system, saying “it was crippled by union work rules,” Isaacson reports. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.”

Lest this be a surprise to the center-left, Jobs embraced education reform generally and school vouchers specifically with even more vigor during a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution:

I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system … One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents …

… in schools people don’t feel that they’re spending their own money. They feel like it’s free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. A matter of fact if you want to put your kid in a private school, you can’t take the forty-four hundred dollars a year out of the public school and use it, you have to come up with five or six thousand of your own money. I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you’d see a lot of new schools starting. I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There’s no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years.

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Why are we so focused on test scores?

By Adam Emerson on October 20, 2011

Is it fair to classify as “dopes” those parents who choose schools that report poor test performance? Not if we only focus on test performance, which may be a muddy measure of how kids are benefitting, Rick Hess writes. Hess directs readers to a recent paper by several economists who examined the open-enrollment initiative at Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and found substantive long-term gains. The enrollment plan launched in 2001, yielding, according to the study, higher graduation rates with no cream skimming.

“Among applicants with low-quality neighborhood schools, lottery winners are more likely than lottery losers to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor’s degree,” authors David Deming, Justine Hastings, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger conclude. “They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university. The results suggest that school choice can improve students’ longer-term life chances when they gain access to schools that are better on observed dimensions of quality.”

Earlier today on this page, Alan Bonsteel, the president of California Parents for Educational Choice, urged school choice groups to embrace the argument that enhanced levels of school choice can yield higher graduation rates. Similarly, Hess writes:

Maybe parents aren’t dopes. Maybe reading and math scores, at least on today’s assessments, are actually muddy measures of how much kids are benefiting. Maybe parents who express high levels of satisfaction with choice see that their kids are better behaved and more focused, disciplined, and academically engaged. Maybe they judge that this gives their kids a much better shot at a bright future, even if their short-term reading and math scores aren’t moving a lot …

… Now, let’s be clear. I don’t know that any of this is true. But it seems as viable as the “parents are dopes” hypothesis. Yet school choice researchers have been so focused for two decades on examining whether choice lifts test scores that they’ve not yet spent much time exploring just why it is that parental satisfaction seems to so dramatically exceed the test score evidence. On the bright side that just means there are huge opportunities ahead. So, guys, how about it?

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The persuasive power of graduation rates

By Alan Bonsteel on October 20, 2011

Editor’s note: This post comes from Dr. Alan Bonsteel, the president of California Parents for Educational Choice and an associate with the American Center for School Choice, which recently joined an alliance with redefinED.

The nation’s staggeringly high dropout rates are perhaps the strongest argument for school choice, and state-level school choice organizations can have enormous leverage in wielding this weapon. At one time it seemed that test scores might be that argument, but the public school establishment has been largely successful in dodging that concern, both by using non-secure tests in which the teachers can teach to actual test questions, and by churning out phony studies that falsely claim that the test score improvements seen with school choice disappear once the results are adjusted for the poverty levels of the students.

Graduation rates, however, are far harder to spin, and the public intuitively accepts the observation that when families can choose the school right for them, the investment that is made and the sense of community that results has profound benefits in getting kids safely to graduation day.

Our organization, California Parents for Educational Choice, launched the first salvo in this war in 1999, when we got newspapers across the state to report on their front pages the reality that we were losing a third of our kids to dropping out. In 2002, Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute took the issue to the national stage. In 2004, George Bush and John Kerry both used the correct figure of one-third of our kids dropping out of high school in the presidential debates, and the war for public opinion was largely won.

Almost all state departments of education, however, are still reporting falsely low dropout rates. It is here that local school choice groups can use their leverage, as it turns out that, while Democratic politicians still usually oppose school choice, most will at least favour accurate dropout rates being made available to the public.

In 2008, for example, California passed SB 651 by Democratic State Sen. Gloria Romero, which reformed dropout rate reporting in our state. As a result, we now have the nation’s strongest dropout reporting system, although still one that needs much work. The more accurate dropout rates generated by that law were key in 2010 and again this year in passing our Parent Trigger law, a concept that is now sweeping across the nation.

Passing a new law may seem daunting to members of a state school choice organization, but it turns out to be easier than it seems to persuade even the old guard that supports the status quo that the public is entitled to the truth on this crucial issue.

The dropout issue has turned out to be the school choice movement’s secret weapon — the equivalent from World War II of the bazooka, the cracking of the Nazi enigma code, and the Flying Fortress bomber all rolled into one. Let’s not hesitate to keep using this breakthrough weapon to free our children.

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The power of pause and repeat

By Jon East on October 19, 2011

The stunning success of Khan Academy, an online learning experiment that has now delivered more than 80-million free lessons worldwide, is well documented at this point. But to listen to MIT and Harvard whiz kid Salman Khan describe his journey is to appreciate the extent to which he has only scratched the surface. For those who are not convinced that digital learning will play a significant role in modern education, Khan shows us four math classrooms in Los Altos, California, public schools that he has flipped upside down.

In those classrooms, teaching is first introduced at home. As homework, students sign in to the online collection of 2,600 videos and interactive software. They proceed at their own pace and, with the benefit of pause and repeat, can dwell on a difficult concept without worrying what a teacher or classmate might think. The next day, the students begin to work through problems in class, as the classroom teacher then becomes a roving mentor who is able to expand upon the lessons from the previous night and work at a deeper level with students at their own pace. In just one year, the number of students in remedial math classes that were deemed to be proficient or advanced nearly doubled and the number of students deemed to be far below basic disappeared.

Khan also showed the progress of one student, a student who moved so haltingly in the beginning weeks that he might have been demoted a level. That student, after finally mastering the topics that did not come easily, excelled so quickly that he finished the semester at the top of his class.

“So the paradigm here,” Khan said, “is that instead of holding fixed the amount of time you have to learn something and then the variable being how well you know it, we’re saying let’s make the variable how long it takes you to master a concept, and let’s make the fixed thing that you’ve really mastered the concept. … In classrooms today, you can fail an exam, and you’re still expected to move on to the next concept.”

Khan, a former Boston hedge fund analyst, wowed a crowd of 800 educators, advocates and elected officials with a speech at the National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco that is available online at the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

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Graduating to a new conversation about choice

By Adam Emerson on October 18, 2011

The Fordham Institute’s enterprise in Ohio weighed in over the weekend on the prospects of additional school options in the Buckeye State, and it did so with characteristic balance. Neither Terry Ryan nor Mike Petrilli are ever bashful to highlight the mixed results of many school options, and they’re smart to embrace “accountability done right” in a way that many advocates for choice do not. But just as importantly, they’re deft at bringing clarity to debates that too quickly rage out of control.

“The genie of school choice is out of the bottle,” Ryan wrote in the The Columbus Dispatch in response to the coming political storm in Ohio over the proposed Parental Choice and Taxpayer Saving Scholarship Program. In other words, though one more private option may feel like “piling on to some,” Ryan says, private and public options have thrived in Ohio since the 1990s, and it’s time we had a new conversation where we leave old fears behind.

More than 75,000 students are enrolled in some 350 charter schools. The EdChoice Scholarship Program provides vouchers to students in failing schools, and it is set to expand from 14,000 to 30,000 students next year. The Autism Scholarship Program now serves more than 1,300 youngsters. More than 7,200 students participate in the Cleveland scholarship program, Ohio’s oldest. In June, Ohio added a special-needs voucher program that will provide support of up to $20,000 to eligible students to attend private schools.

Ohio’s school districts also have a number of choice programs: magnet schools and alternative programs, STEM high schools and Early College Academies. And 429 districts allow students from anywhere in the state to attend their schools via open enrollment. (Another 90 allow students from adjacent districts to enroll.) And thousands of families have moved in pursuit of better educational options for their children.

The challenge, Ryan adds, “is to ensure that quality keeps pace with quantity and availability.” Regulation is a four-letter word to many voucher proponents, but Ryan makes the case that “accountability is the partner of choice”:

The latter creates space for innovation and new options, while the former drives change and pushes for continuous improvement. Accountability exposes poor performers and charlatans, while also highlighting successful schools.

The challenge facing policymakers is that, while many voices clamor for widened choice and the opportunities that go with it, far fewer demand accountability for performance. Getting the balance right will determine whether school choice in Ohio succeeds or fails to improve student outcomes. It also could serve as the basis for political détente around school-choice issues.

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How Jerry Brown makes a case for parental empowerment

By Peter H. Hanley on October 17, 2011

Editor’s note: This entry comes from Peter H. Hanley, the executive director of the American Center for School Choice, which last week joined an alliance with redefinED.

California Gov. Jerry Brown’s veto message for a bill that would have expanded the criteria that the state’s Academic Performance Index (API) would utilize in evaluating the quality of a school raises interesting questions about the proper role of data versus softer quality measures, such as parent satisfaction. In deriding the bill as full of “ill-defined” and “impossible to design” indicators, Brown quotes Einstein’s maxim, “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.” He goes on to query:

What about a system that relies on locally convened panels to visit schools, observe teachers, interview students, and examine student work? Such a system wouldn’t produce an API number, but it could improve the quality of our schools.

I agree with those that say the entire assessment of school quality should not be laid on the outcomes of once-a-year high stakes tests, but for this the status quo forces in California that have so long dominated education policy have mostly themselves to blame. The 1999 Public Schools Accountability Act, which created the API, clearly mandated the inclusion of attendance and graduation rates as well as other indicators, but the resistance to and outright obfuscation of accountability has been and continues to be intense. Just a decade ago, the California Department of Education asserted the dropout rate was about 3 percent, when in fact it was closer to 10 times that level. Only in the last two years have we moved closer to accurate dropout rates. Moreover, the perfect is always the enemy of the good in any California debate about school or teacher evaluation.

Instead, we have heard incessant complaints about “teaching to the test” when in fact if you are teaching the standards and the test is aligned, that is what is supposed to be happening. If schools have devolved to rote “drill and kill” curriculum, that is on them, not the testing system. Reading and math can be taught across the curriculum and the best schools do that in engaging ways.

The largest fault with the API and the annual California Standards Tests (CST) is never discussed — it’s a high stakes test for schools and a no stakes test for students. CST results do not go to colleges or appear on a transcript. They have no effect whatever on who graduates or moves on to the next sequenced course. The state, in the 12 years since the Act was passed, has been unable to figure out how to get the results of tests taken in April and May back to the schools before the end of August, thus rendering them virtually useless in placing students in the most appropriate courses or doing any immediate remediation, either for students or for faculty that may be lacking in teaching particular standards. Although impossible to quantify, undoubtedly student performance is affected, especially for middle and high school students that have figured out that the tests mean nothing to them personally.

But Brown, probably unintentionally, makes an excellent case of why we need more parental choice in the Golden State. Not only, as Jack Coons noted in his recent post on redefinED, do parents know their children’s needs in ways that no one else can, but they can do the kind of school assessment that Brown noted in his message, visiting the school, observing teachers, and reviewing student work and then aligning those with their child’s needs. This is perhaps one of the most reliable methods of ensuring school quality.

Every survey shows that parent satisfaction in the charter school community is off the charts compared with those parents who have not been able to have choice. Like any other measurement, it’s not perfect. Some parents, particularly in our cities, define a good school as one where their child will not be shot or stabbed, but overall expanding choice options has been a strong positive for families.

California charter schools remain under unceasing attacks that attempt to limit their flexibility and make them exactly like the traditional public schools. Instead, we need to seek ways to expand parental choice and authority for their children’s education as well as increase their access to good schools with diverse methods of attaining achievement. Introducing a tax credit scholarship program could do this and would likely save the California budget some money. Clearly, this is working well in other states such as Florida. We are losing some excellent private schools, particularly in California’s urban communities, which have served those areas well for decades and which parents would continue to choose if funding were available. If Governor Brown follows his reasoning to a logical conclusion, trusting parental choice and satisfaction should become a key and leading indicator for school accountability and making more schools accessible.

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At its core, a political and practical ideal

By Jon East on October 14, 2011

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush opened his national education conference in San Francisco today with an impassioned plea for national Common Core Standards, reminding us of both their relevance and broad political acceptance.

Bush’s conference, the National Summit on Education Reform, has become one of the country’s top venues for education reform and a place where ideas are increasingly attracting bipartisan attention. His support of national standards is hardly new, of course, and reflects the foundation on which he built his A+ Education Plan in Florida. There, he employed “Sunshine State Standards” to drive a plan that then used tests not only to assure the progress of students but also to grade the performance of public schools. “What gets measured,” he often says, “gets done.”

Among the examples Bush used was that of writing. Most states now teach and test writing in strikingly superficial ways. They ask students to write about personal experiences, their family, their travel, their likes and dislikes. But the Common Core Standards, now adopted by 46 states, aspire to do much more. Even fifth-graders are required to “support a point of view with reasons and information, to introduce a topic or text clearly …. to provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details.” By high school, a student is expected to “introduce a topic and organize complex ideas, concepts and information so that each new element builds on that which precedes it to create a unified whole” and to use “relevant facts, extended definitions, concrete details, quotations or other information and examples appropriate to the audience’s knowledge of the topic.”

These are skills that will help a student succeed not only in college but also in a work world that increasingly depends on people who can synthesize and communicate complex information. Bush certainly knows that.

These standards give some federalists heartburn, of course, which is why it is so important to see a prominent Republican conservative make the case so forcefully. Bush also makes the distinction in how standards are implemented that should provide common ground for common standards. “It is good for our nation to embrace these kinds of standards,” he said. “But for the solutions we need to let states determine their own path.”

Politicos may call that threading the needle, but educators should embrace it for its practicality.

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Parental authority is at the heart of school choice

By John E. Coons on October 12, 2011

Editor’s note: This entry comes from John E. Coons, who has championed the cause of school choice for four decades and co-founded the American Center for School Choice. He is Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and with colleague Stephen D. Sugarman is the author of Private Wealth and Public Education. He is our newest host of redefinED.

We founded the American Center for School Choice because we believe a focus on parental empowerment can contribute to a broadening and coalescing of the coalition that seeks to provide the best possible education for children. Simultaneously, empowering parents creates a common good—for the child, the parent, the family, and society.

We begin with the delicate subject of authority—that of parent or of government over the mind of the young. In our culture, authority over thought (or even behavior) has never been a popular premise for argument. But no other way exists; some adult will in fact select a preferred set of skills and values and will attempt, through schooling, to convince Johnny, Susie, Jamal, or Juanita of their truth. Authority is simply a fact.

Whether one is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or the National Education Association, we must proceed by asking which big person will decide this issue for some little person. The fact of authority is no exit, but it is instead the necessary entrance to the debate of educators and society about content, values, money, liberty, the best interest of the child, and the common good.

The debate on authority dates from Plato’s vision in the The Republic of an ideal state that would completely disempower parents for a utopian common good and continues up to modern times. But in the U.S., the question of who has authority over the child has been universally resolved in all 50 states in favor of parents. In every state the custodial parent, whether natural or adoptive, holds a very wide ranging legal authority over his, her, or their own child. This sovereignty includes every experience of the child that the parent can physically and intellectually control short of neglect and abuse. It encompasses diet, hours, church, pets, exercise, and television as well as the power to decide who else shall have access to the child. This power to control access and environment includes, again, within broadest limits, the satisfaction of the parents’ obligation to school the child and the child’s own right to be schooled.

This authority has been tested in a steady line of Supreme Court cases since 1925. The parent who is legally fit to govern—99% of our parents—in truth has the right to govern. And the point of the law is not that parents make particularly good decisions for the children; individual mothers and fathers may or may not act in what you or I consider the best interest of the child or society. They are not necessarily good deciders; they are merely the best our culture, law, and history have discovered. They also have accountability in ways that are impossible to the world of American professionals, of doctors, lawyers, educators, and so forth. These people see clients for a time, do their best, wish them well, and head on home. The custodial parent is stuck—for better or worse and maybe for life—with what emerges out of whatever effort is made.

This wide acceptance throughout American society and its legal system of deference to and accountability for parental authority forms the foundation for broadening the support for choice in education. Our current system is an aberration of the way the rest of American life functions. Continue Reading →

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A new era, and a new partner, for redefinED

By Fawn Spady and Stephen D. Sugarman on October 11, 2011

Editor’s note: As redefinED enters its second year of publication, it has joined an alliance with the American Center for School Choice. Its first post comes from Fawn Spady, the Center’s chairwoman, and Stephen D. Sugarman, its vice chairman.

Today the American Center for School Choice begins its exciting partnership with redefinED in a joint effort to focus attention on the importance of empowering parents with the authority to educate their children. The mission of the American Center for School Choice, advocating expansion of public support for families to choose the schools they believe will best serve their children, is rooted in two basic propositions:

The education of the child is a fundamental responsibility of the family
Enabling parents to choose the school that will best help them to fulfill this responsibility will strengthen families, schools, and communities

The American Center supports the work of the many fine organizations advocating for education reform based on expanding the power of consumers in the educational marketplace and the need for greatly improved academic outcomes. The movement has won significant political victories, but also experienced many defeats.

Our organization’s name was intentionally selected because we believe a strong political center and consequently a broad coalition for school choice exists in a focus on parental empowerment. In placing families first, the Center’s perspective creates a unique and powerful opportunity to expand support for school choice to include greater numbers of political centrists, religious leaders, social justice advocates, and ordinary citizens who are either uninformed or uninspired by current educational reform debates.

Ultimately, we need to create and support good schools of all types to serve the diversity of our population’s needs. We want to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities, including inter- and intra-district choice of public schools, choice through public charter schools, and choice of private and religious schools through publicly funded scholarship and tax credit programs. The American Center for School Choice believes that expanding support for families to choose public, private, or religious schools for their children is a civic and moral imperative.

The Center’s primary activity is education. All families, but especially low-income parents and students who have not been well served historically, benefit when they select the school that they believe will best serve their children. The Center has utilized a variety of media and forums to provide information and analyses to deepen public understanding of the benefits, costs and design requirements of a full range of school choice opportunities. In partnering with redefinED, we have found a kindred spirit where great synergy exists.

Our board, associates, and staff will be regularly contributing their thoughts on where we are, where we hope to go next, and how best to get there. In addition to us, you will hear from Jack Coons, Charles Glenn, Gloria Romero, Terry Moe, Darla Romfo, Alan Bonsteel, Rick Garnett, and others in our network. We all look forward to joining and stimulating ongoing thoughtful and respectful exchanges that have marked redefined since its beginning.

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On public schools, Catholic schools and educating the whole child

By Adam Emerson on October 7, 2011

Our perceptions of inadequacy of public schools has led politically to our infatuation with standardized testing, and that has upended the mission to educate the whole child, writes Philip V. Robey, an executive with the National Catholic Educational Association and a former principal and teacher in public schools and Catholic schools.

In his Education Week commentary, Robey says the larger field of education could learn some things from the administration of Catholic schools:

When Catholic schools say they teach the whole child, they mean it. By nature and mission, these schools operate in such a way that moral choices and character values are just as strongly emphasized as educational performance. This emphasis contributes to a culture fostering the notion that it is important to use our gifts well, and be appreciative of them …

… In high-stakes testing environments, the educational emphasis falls on adults and their ability to raise students’ scores. The stakes are important enough that financial incentives are sometimes used as enticements. While, on the surface, this sort of rewarding may seem harmless, it can undermine the educational process by putting such a heavy emphasis on test scores that there is little energy for much else.

Statements like that would find a friendly audience in Diane Ravitch, Matt Damon and the masses behind Save Our Schools. So why do these same advocates become unraveled at the prospect of publicly funding a scholarship that could bring a low-income child to one of Robey’s schools?

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« Previous 1 … 85 86 87 … 111 Next »

Jobs on education: We’ve forgotten that the customers are the parents

Why are we so focused on test scores?

The persuasive power of graduation rates

The power of pause and repeat

Graduating to a new conversation about choice

How Jerry Brown makes a case for parental empowerment

At its core, a political and practical ideal

Parental authority is at the heart of school choice

A new era, and a new partner, for redefinED

On public schools, Catholic schools and educating the whole child

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