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Archive for the ‘Reform’ Category

A sterling example of community-driven reform

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Editor’s note: Jeanne Kaplan is a member of the Denver school board.

Since I was first elected to the Denver Public Schools Board of Education in November 2005, improving our middle school programs has been a top priority.

As noted in Jeremy P. Meyer’s Denver Post story of Thursday, August 19, 2010, some of our middle schools are making academic and enrollment gains of which we can be proud.

However, Mr. Meyer’s story about Hill Middle School does not tell the whole story, so I would like to elaborate on its success.

In 2003, Denver taxpayers voted for a mill levy specifically to revitalize neighborhood schools in areas where schools were underperforming, under enrolled and not meeting neighborhood needs.

Hill Middle School was one of the first recipients of this money, and as we can see, it has used this money and its plan to become a resounding success.

Hill’s enrollment has grown from just over 52% capacity in 2006 (A+ Denver statistics) to close to full capacity with a waiting list in 2010. Its test scores have soared since 2004.

The Hill community worked very hard to determine and define what the preferences of its community were. It worked together in a very collaborative fashion with teachers, parents, administrators, and neighbors.

It determined that people wanted an arts and technology focused program with honors classes for all students who could qualify. It did not want to have a magnet program, but rather wanted a school that accepted all interested students, and it wanted a school with a good selection of electives.

The committee also placed a high value on being able to walk or bike to the revitalized school. The parents involved in this process have worked tirelessly to develop a middle school program with high expectations and equal opportunities for all.

Hill Middle School is an example of a very successful community-driven reform. It is highly unlikely that the academic gains and the attendance gains would have been as pronounced without the revitalization efforts, funded by the Denver taxpayers and implemented by a local school committee responding to the wishes of its community.

Is revitalization of neighborhood schools the only route DPS should be taking? Of course not. But then, neither should community-driven reforms be overlooked as viable solutions for struggling schools.

Congratulations to all of the Hill community for taking charge of its successful turnaround strategy.

Popularity: 5% [?]

A teachable moment?

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Complaints about some evaluators not fully understanding our true value …  a sense that points were taken away unfairly, despite reviewer training in the appropriate rubrics  ….  evaluators not understanding, and not crediting us, for the things we do well… a sense that someone in a higher position should reverse the injustice.   It all feels unfair.

Yes, but, most of these Colorado complaints about the round two R2T scoring could also be applied to premature teacher evaluation based upon the inappropriate use of faulty test score data.

Isn’t there some irony in the fact that some of the folks complaining about unfair R2T scoring of Colorado’s application are also among the ones who turned a deaf ear to, or brushed aside, some of the legitimate concerns about using current test scores to evaluate teachers?

My colleague Robert Reichardt made a similar point in April, after Colorado lost round 1 of R2T.  Now we feel twice the pain.

Let me be clear.  I support better teacher evaluation and we need to move in that direction, using multiple measures of better and more frequent principal and peer evaluation, and some appropriate use of student test scores.

There are certainly some individuals and groups who have looked for any reason not to advance real teacher evaluation, because they want to preserve the status quo (which is basically no useful teacher evaluation), and I don’t want to support that position.  At the same time, there are lots of others who see legitimate problems with the current technology that ties student test results to specific teacher evaluations, and want to proceed carefully, in order to do this right.  I was surprised how little attention policy makers gave to that latter group this spring.

As the implementation of SB 191 moves forward into the implementation stage, but now without federal funding to support it, we should keep these concerns in mind.

There are at least four reasons why we can’t now validly and reliably link teacher evaluations to student test scores.  When we address some of these elements, we will be able to more fairly and more effectively evaluate teachers.

First, we don’t have good value-added tests.  A annual March CSAP test is not good enough (you need a valid beginning and end of year test to the same students whose gain you want to assess), and more than half of Colorado grades/subjects don’t even have the annual CSAP available anyway.

Second, students are probably not randomly assigned to teachers, as this evaluation processes requires.  If teacher Jane is known by her principal to be good at teaching students with serious family problems, and thus gets assigned a group of difficult students, and moves their knowledge forward by 0.75 grade levels, while teacher Joan is known to not be good with difficult students, and gets all of the easier ones, and advances their knowledge by 1.0 grade level, who has done a better job?  (It isn’t clear that we can, or want to, “fix” this, but it is a reality that skews the data).

Third, one year of data is not a large enough sample to use for a teacher – you probably need 3.  Classes of 26 students, with 50% mobility levels that are not uncommon in urban areas, leave 13 students with a particular teacher all year – that is not enough data to make a reliable judgment about teacher quality.

Fourth, lots of good teaching is joint and collaborative, especially at the secondary level.   The social science teacher may be as responsible for improved student writing as is the English teacher.  We don’t want teaching to only be a solitary practice with no sharing and collaboration.

Added to these concerns, making student test scores very high-stakes will greatly increase the likelihood of outright cheating, as well as more subtle “teaching to the test” (and not the good kind, where people teach the subjects they are supposed to teach, but the overly narrowing kind where you only ask the types of questions known to be on the test).

I won’t try to make this post double-ironic, but among the beauty of Denver’s own ProComp is that it was put together by and with teachers, and advanced by a teacher vote, and it incorporates multiple measures, to recognize that we can’t really nail down a single dimension of teaching to assess and reward.  It is disappointing that we couldn’t summon that kind of process at the state level.

To see a different way of handling this issue, Chad Aldeman of the Quick and Ed blog (a strongly pro-reform  voice) recently contrasted LA’s handling of teacher data with Tennessee’s approach:

“In contrast, Tennessee has been using a value-added model since the late 1980’s, and every year since the mid-1990’s every single eligible teacher has received a report on their results. When these results were first introduced, teachers were explicitly told their results would never be published in newspapers and that the data may be used in evaluations. In reality, they had never really been used in evaluations until the state passed a law last January requiring the data to make up 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. This bill, and 100% teacher support for the state’s Race to the Top application that included it, was a key reason the state won a $500 million grant in the first round.”

Popularity: 13% [?]

We can’t win

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Colorado can’t win; that is lesson of the Race to the Top (R2T) competition.  Actually the lesson is that states that can’t enforce compliance by schools are not going to win in national competitions. This means Western states where local control means something very different than in does east of the Mississippi will always be left out.  (Hawaii is a singular case with a single statewide school district).

At the same time, Colorado districts have proved they can innovate with the best of them.  Two Colorado districts (DPS and St. Vrain) won in the much more competitive Investment in Innovation (I3) competition where there were 49 winners out of over 1,600 applications.

It is not that Colorado lacks the ideas or the innovators at the state level, but when we can’t draw that straight line of authority from the Colorado Department of Education to classrooms, we won’t win…at least as long as the current top-down perspective on how education systems work prevails among education thinkers and leaders.

The problem is not just that the bureaucrats at the Department of Ed don’t get the West; the reviewers don’t get it either. The scores for both of our R2T applications showed wide variation among reviewers.  This means Colorado’s tight-accountability, loose-compliance model is understood and supported by only some in the corps of evaluators. A significant number of education thinkers and leaders believe that top-down command and control is the way for states to get things done in school systems, regardless of how far that drifts from reality.

Colorado and the rest of the West will never win unless we can make the case that the tight-accountability, loose-compliance model can support innovation and improve student outcomes.  This should not be a hard case to make.

The success of Colorado districts in the I3 competitions as well as the innovations from our charter school sector clearly show the benefit of being firm on outcomes but loose on means. The fact that the U.S. Department of Education continues to support charter schools while also pushing top-down models suggests there is (or at least should be) a debate in their own hallways on valid theories of action at the district and state level.

So what do we do next?  There is plenty of work for everyone.

For our Washington representatives (that means you Sen. Bennet and DPS alum now Senior Advisor in the Department of Education Brad Jupp), repeat every day: “Local control is different in the West” and “Students are well served when schools and districts are allowed to innovate.”  Equally important, if the reauthorization of NCLB moves towards more competitive grants, do not set up Colorado to compete with other states. Focus the competition between districts and schools, where we can win.

The research and journalism community must get better about explaining how local control looks in the West and that it is not a bad thing for kids.  We all know that the words “local control” often are used to stall reform.  But researchers need to highlight our successes throughout the state and show that with accountability for outcomes local control also can lead to innovation, creativity, and better outcomes for kids.

The foundation community should continue to support Colorado reform AND support those researchers, journalists and bloggers who can make the case to the nation that we are different from the East Coast and that our students are better off for it.

Finally, the education community must demonstrate that we can raise student achievement and close the achievement gap in Colorado. Our reform plate is full with new standards, teacher evaluation systems, and approaches toward low-performing schools.  If we try to do too many things without enough resources, we are guaranteed to fail. We should slow down on teacher evaluation systems and focus on getting classroom fundamentals right by ensuring that teachers are implementing curricula that are aligned with our new standards.

AND we all should remember the core lesson from this: Stop trying to compete with other states. We can’t win.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Federal grant sweepstakes: An insider’s view

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Many people in Colorado are angry, frustrated or just confused after the U.S. Department of Education passed over Colorado while awarding grants in the Race to The Top (RTT).   After a similar loss in round one, Colorado made advances in the last legislative session that were politically painful to achieve, but repeatedly praised and defended because they would help Colorado’s chances at winning this competition.

Nevertheless, the state managed to rank only 17 out of the 19 finalists.  After the Feds decided to award only 10 grants, friends in Colorado are asking, “What’s up with that?”

A few assertions appeared throughout this process that deserve a response. Over the last year, I have repeatedly heard statements such as the following:

“But President Obama and Secretary Duncan want to support all our reforms, and they especially want to help Colorado’s new Senator, Michael Bennet.  Since he is such a reform champion, and potentially vulnerable in the next election, surely they’ll help him bring home the bacon to Colorado.”

Or

“This is too important a competition to leave it up to the bureaucrats and some peer reviewers. With 3.4 billion dollars at stake, the political appointees are definitely going to make sure the “right” states win, and we are certainly among the chosen in Colorado.  They can’t deny us!”

As these ideas, or more subtle versions of them, were raised over the last year and a half, I have politely tried to explain that federal grant competitions don’t work that way.  As a former employee at the U.S. Department, I worked around various national competitions for federal funds that were awarded through similar competitions – albeit for considerably smaller amounts and with lower profile programs and less political stakes involved.

I started out as neither a political appointee nor a career official at the department. I began serving with a temporary expert appointment and eventually I wormed my way into the Department’s career staff where I led the Department’s Public Charter Schools Program.

I’m not a lawyer so don’t ask me to quote the code, but all these competitions are run under the auspices of various federal rules and regulations and within the limitations of the statutory provisions for that particular grant program as they are written by Congress.  They are administered by career professionals rather than political appointees.  Peer reviewers rank the proposals in a “slate,” with the highest-scoring application at the top and the rest of the applicants listed in order of their score down the list.  The funds are awarded to each high ranked applicant in order until the available funds are used up, or until the remaining applicants were ranked so poorly that they were basically determined ineligible.

Keep this piece in mind if you ever apply for these grants. Unless it is in the criteria of the review, the amount applicants ask for is not really part of the decision-making process until after the ranking takes place.  Only then do the amounts matter, but only as they are totaled up in a running total as the officials designate grantees further and further down the slate.  When they use up all the available funds at the funding levels requested the applicants, a line is drawn through the slate. Those above get what they asked for, and the rest of the applicants are bitter losers.

Political appointees are not allowed to do much beyond provide input into the creation of the RFP and the rubrics, or the writing of selection criteria for peer reviewers. Even the rubrics are subject to the rule-making process, or a set of “generic” criteria are applied for low-profile programs.  Once those materials and the list of reviewers are set, the political folks would be violating the rules and regulations if they were making decisions.  If they put pressure on the non-political folks to change scores, or if they insist that the career administrators pass over one applicant and award funds to an applicant that was given a lower score, the political appointees (and their bosses) get in trouble.  It is juggling of this sort over Reading First that got folks in trouble during the last administration.

But there is one thing that political appointees could have done, or argued for, that might have changed the outcome after the ranked slate of applicants was determined by the application process.  They could have tried to argue that the awardees should get smaller grants, which frees up money to award grants to the next few applicants on the slate.  However, in this case, that is still extremely unlikely to have helped Colorado get funded. This is because of Colorado’s low ranking in the competition and the Department’s interest in ensuring that these grants be so incredibly big that states would do anything to get them.

An analysis of the states that were competing, their scores in the competition, their student populations, and the size of the awards granted to the lucky winners quickly shows us why any political shenanigans (even the quasi-legal effort to reduce award amounts to create money to fund lower-ranked applicants) were unlikely to have helped Colorado in this case.

The other forms of string-pulling that Colorado may have hoped, or other states feared, would generally produce scandals so distracting, and so potentially damaging to the Administration, that the risk of leaving Colorado – and even Candidate Bennet — without this prize would pale in comparison to the risk of trying to help them unscrupulously.

So if we assume adjusting amounts was the only strategy at their disposal, how could it have worked? It depends on how much states get and whether those amounts could have been adjusted enough to fund Colorado – not likely.  Figure 1. below lists awards received from the RTT in the first two competitions, the student populations of each state, and the award amount calculated on a per-student basis (as if every student in the state had a portion of the RTT grant award spent on their education.) In truth, districts are guaranteed only 50% of the total, and how districts spend the money is dictated by the application.  But the measure of each state’s student population gives a rough measure of the scale of their education system and the capacity to spend a huge grant like this.

Figure 1.

State Students 2010 Total Award RTT Dollars/student
D.C. 58,191 75,000,000 1289
Delaware 114,062 100,000,000 877
Rhode Island 113,066 75,000,000 663
Tennessee 963,264 500,000,000 519
Hawaii 179,897 75,000,000 417
Mass. 799,227 250,000,000 313
Maryland 845,700 250,000,000 296
North Carolina 1,425,076 400,000,000 281
Florida 2,645,680 700,000,000 265
New York 2,730,427 700,000,000 256
Georgia 1,646,010 400,000,000 243
Ohio 1,743,920 400,000,000 229

The RTT was not a formula. It was a competitive program. However, the amount a state could compete for was determined by a crude formula that set broad parameters for possible funds in each round of the competition based on relative state size. Under this formula Colorado was applying for $175 million.  All of the awards certainly pass the “ginormous test” by any state’s standards of avarice.  However, the variation in the dollars per student raise questions about the wisdom of such a crude formula driving the size of such huge awards.

There is unquestionably much that can be done to improve D.C. or Delaware’s education reform efforts, and maybe there are efficiencies of scale that make reform easier and cheaper in bigger states, like New York and Ohio — yeah, sure.  No matter how you cut it, it is hard to argue these tiny jurisdictions need four or five times as much money per student as Ohio (where reform is presumably a pretty cheap and easy affair).  But if you’re trying to fund additional states, these relatively excessive amounts for small states don’t help much because the totals would quickly be gobbled up by bigger states ranked higher than Colorado in the competition.

Given this distribution, and even despite regulations and announcements about the amount available to states of different sizes, there could have been room for political pressure.  A hypothetical discussion would go like this, “That seems like a lot of money for some of these states. Can they really spend that much? How about if you look at their budget and their proposal and see if there are areas where it is imprudent to give them as much as they asked?”

If the amounts requested don’t match the work proposed, or there was too much uncertainty about such budgeting issues, then the amounts funded would be negotiated by the career administrators and the states.  Again, the political appointees don’t get to do this directly.  But the political appointees could send serious signals to career staff, and given the scale of these proposals and the rush to get them in, inevitably some wiggle room in award amounts would be possible. The award amounts might plausibly then be reduced to see who else on the slate could be funded.

For arguments sake, let’s say that it was determined that the amount that Ohio actually received per student was a reasonable thing to expect of all recipients – and the original formula proposed in the competition was abandoned in favor of this “little adjustment” to match the Buckeye State.  Figure 2 below includes all states that were finalists in the second round, listed in a slate according to their rank.  The columns on the right indicate the amount the states would have received if total awards were run by formula, with a per student amount set at the minimum of the Round 2 awards ($229 per student).  The far right column indicates the total amount of spending given that per student amount.  As we see, if this strategy were pursued, three more states could have been funded within before the total amount available to spend expended was used up (New Jersey, Arizona and Louisiana).

Figure 2.

State

Massachusetts

RTT Rank

(Round 2 )

1

Amount if awarded $229/Student

183,022,983

Running Total

183,022,983

New York 2 625,267,783 808,290,766
Hawaii 3 41,196,413 849,487,179
Florida 4 605,860,720 1,455,347,899
Rhode Island 5 25,892,114 1,481,240,013
Maryland 6 193,665,300 1,674,905,313
District of Columbia 6 13,325,739 1,688,231,052
Georgia 8 376,936,290 2,065,167,342
North Carolina 9 326,342,404 2,391,509,746
Ohio 10 399,357,680 2,790,867,426
New Jersey 11 31,132,321 2,821,999,747
Arizona 12 226,054,602 3,048,054,349
Louisiana 13 149,165,333 Last grant        3,197,219,682
South Carolina 14 162,814,878 3,360,034,560
Illinois 15 480,698,022 3,840,732,582
California 16 1,434,646,299 5,275,378,881
Colorado 17 182,930,696 5,458,309,577
Pennsylvania 18 393,556,652 5,851,866,229
Kentucky 19 152,518,351 6,004,384,580

Continuing in this fashion, if the total grant award were reduced to $200 per student, with the current ranking, South Carolina would be the only state added. At $150 per student, it would add Illinois.  It would take a reduction to awards based on a formula of around $135 per student before Colorado and California would receive grants given the current ranking among the slate of finalists.  At that point the current round of successful recipients would have had to receive a total of $1.67 billion less to free up money to get down the slate all the way to Colorado. That’s a financial and political loss to all the current winners of an average of 167 million dollars less than what they actually received in the competition.

If Colorado were ranked 11th out of 19 finalists, then the kind political pressure that might reduce a few grants to fund one more could have come into play.  Entering the part of the process where political pressure is most likely to benefit a friend ranked 17th out of 19 applicants made that help entirely unfeasible. Apparently New Jersey, the unfortunate state on the bubble, isn’t high enough on the Administration’s list of political priorities to incent them to play games with this competition.

Looking at a spread sheet like this I suspect any political shenanigans start to look mighty risky, with many more losers than winners.  Even for the unscrupulous, a risk-benefit analysis would likely let this competition stand as originally conducted.

While there may be many reasons why people in Colorado are right to be angry at being slighted by the results of this race, the problems come from the score the state received and our rank relative to the other competitors.  There is plenty to gripe about in the process that produced those scores — so there is no need to stop feeling indignant.  But the problems come in the creation of the RFP, the rubric (to the extent they used one) and the various reviewer’s vagaries of scoring. It doesn’t look like the Western states had a chance, or that reviewers understood semi-rural states with their mixed levels of union representation and local control, or the courage Colorado’s leaders took to enact the reforms that are necessary yet offensive to some unions.

That still leaves plenty of reasons to raise your blood pressure. But these are different than the political ones I’ve heard. At least Colorado’s failure is not due to some imagined failure of political leaders to pull the strings a few people wish they had.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Super plug for “Superman”

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Sure, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman can come across as a self-important  blowhard at times. But he is a smart guy, and more important, he gives a hell of a plug to “Waiting for Superman,” a documentary about public education that opens in Denver in October.

There is a lot of publicity building around this film. In Colorado, education reform groups are going to launch a major campaign to get people to see the movie, and based on their anticipated reactions, to get involved in demanding serious systemic change to education in Colorado, and across the nation.

Can a movie prompt such a movement? We’ll see. It’s directed by Davis Guggenheim, who directed “An Inconvenient Truth,” so there is some track record.

I saw the movie a month or so ago, but was told by studio media handlers I absolutely could not write about it until it opened. Well, if Tom Friedman can bust the embargo, so can I. But I’ll restrain myself and just say this: It is beautifully made and powerful. Unavoidably, it over-simplifies matters to make its points. Still, it surpasses other recent films that focus on the same topic — “The Lottery” and the overtly bombastic “The Cartel.”

So I’ll give it three stars (I’m a tough reviewer) and urge people to see it when it opens.

By the way, if you know where people stand on education issues, you can easily predict whether they’ll  love or loathe “Waiting for Superman.”

Popularity: 16% [?]

Losing R2T and the politics of blocking

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

There’s no way to ignore the big news of the week: Colorado lost Race to the Top Round 2. I can’t deny I called it wrong. Like every other observer out there, including many more skillful and attuned than I, my forecast was based on what should happen, not what one might expect given the vagaries of a rigorously bureaucratic grant review process. (Not to mention the “ugly politics” Rick Hess suggests as a result of the misguided focus of the review process.)

To start, there are a couple items I have to clear up. Despite any rumors to the contrary, I had nothing at all to do with this morning’s lead editorial in the Denver Post (“Way to go, CEA.”) And no, I did not put anything in Mark Sass’s coffee before he wrote “Screw the Feds.” Moving on….

In their insightful 2009 volume Liberating Learning, Terry Moe and John Chubb included an important chapter titled “The Politics of Blocking.” Therein they explained how teachers unions with their uniquely enormous capacity to fund a powerful political machine are more adept at stopping reforms they don’t like than they are in implementing changes on their agenda. The authors identify many points in the process at which legislation can be killed — from committee votes to the veto pen to courtroom challenges. One win and it’s done.

That’s why it was so remarkable SB 191 emerging unscathed with some minor concessions to be signed into law. But maybe there are a couple additional points in “The Politics of Blocking” Moe and Chubb might have mentioned. First, undermining efforts to obtain resources to fund the reform plan. It’s not entirely clear to what extent CEA’s refusal to sign on to the R2T Round 2 application (as opposed to say reviewers’ bias against, or inability to understand, systems of local control) hurt the effort. But it certainly didn’t help.

Second, and more significantly, it’s time to consider that Colorado might see the politics of blocking through implementation. Now that we know federal funds aren’t available, the Council on Educator Effectiveness figures to have a harder time overcoming its early inertia. Would certain elements represented on the Council pursue a “kill the clock”-style strategy while lobbying a new legislature to further water down or slow down SB 191′s implementation? For this reason alone, watching this fall’s state legislative and state board of education elections will be interesting.

Once the initial sting of injustice starts to wear off, maybe others will join me in seeing that maybe Colorado is just as well off without the $175 million in federal funds and strings attached. There are plenty of state and local school officials out there who are interested in revisiting the Common Core standards issue, for example. If the money isn’t there anyway, why can’t Colorado re-implement its own standards and add on the few Common Core bits seen as improvements — rather than the other way around?

The fallout from Tuesday’s stunning announcement is just beginning.

Popularity: 14% [?]

At least Denver earns a high score

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

While we learned that Colorado’s Race to the Top application was ranked 17th out of the 19 finalists by objective reviewers, Denver was ranked 4th out of 30 cities examined in a Fordham Institute report issued yesterday on urban district reform efforts and capacities.

(Fordham probably didn’t realize that the Race to the Top results announcement would dominate this week’s ed news world, but hopefully this urban report will still get the attention it deserves).

New Orleans, with its post-Katrina reform efforts, is ranked #1, followed by Washington, DC and New York City, then Denver.

Urban districts are ranked on their human capital (Denver is 5th here), financial capital (7th), charter environment (8th), quality control (14th), district environment (10th) and municipal environment (4th), for an aggregate Denver ranking of 4th.

As with all such ranking exercises, one can argue with the ratings themselves, the categories or some of the more subjective judgments.   And, a change in superintendent, school board, or mayor can alter these perspectives pretty quickly.

But, this national report does at least support the widely-shared local notion that Denver’s reform efforts are near the cutting edge of national reform, a notion that was shaken by the R2T ratings for Colorado.

Popularity: 7% [?]

R2T: 2, Colo: 0

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

I confess my interest and knowledge on Race to the Top is at some small distance: I did not follow the nuances closely, believing (correctly) that the Colorado bid was in good hands, and (incorrectly) that the hard work of many skilled people would prevail.  And in the wake of disappointment, while I understand the temptation to either complain about the judging, or — far worse — celebrate the defeat as some sort of divine personal vindication, neither make much sense.  For I think the R2T decision is a harsh but helpful reminder of two very important, and often overlooked, truths:

1. Outcomes matter most. For all the rhetoric over the ample list of reforms both instituted (ProComp, the Colorado Growth Model) and pending (CAP4K, SB 191), the hard truth is that overall outcomes in Colorado have not improved. To paraphrase Auden, reform – in and of itself – makes nothing happen.  Waiting for a single reform panacea (or cocktail) remains the dream of a weary Godot.  Reforms — by themselves — mean little. Outcomes, and the changes in the trajectory of individual lives, are everything.  In the wake of this disappointment we should redouble our efforts to examine the places where outcomes are changing, and give these our continued attention and support.

2. Money matters less. Always eclipsed by the lure of a big payday, the hard truth is that since 1970, per-pupil spending in the US has doubled while there has been no improvement in academic results. Money may help a success already in place, but it is never the catalyst for substantive change. Colorado is simply not dependent on largesse of any kind to improve.  There is a lot of money already in the public education system, and in many ways adding additional funds postpones some of the difficult conversations and choices that are necessary. Scarcity usually reveals more than abundance, and tends to sharpen one’s focus: we need to choose between strategies, not continue to add layers of them on top of each other.

So what now?  I suggest: Think local, act local.  Education reform was here before R2T, and it will be here long after the winners have exhausted their checks.  Examples of state-wide successful reform are few and far between, and when the last dime of R2T rolls down the register, there will likely be one or two more — but far less than the number of grantees (12).  And I am pretty confident that there will be an equivalent success somewhere among the nine finalist states that were disappointed, so it might as well be here.  There are instances of real, meaningful, and inchoate reform happening across Colorado (and even scored high on some rewardless lists).  Look locally, focus on outcomes, and remember that in education (as in most things) expense rarely correlates to quality.

After all, as anyone bearing the scars of education reform in Colorado can tell you, it is not now — and never was — a race.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Screw the Feds! Onward to reform!

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

So we did not get the Race to the Top funds. Many are asking now what?–as if our future rested on securing these funds. What has been the reaction in the trenches to the bad news? Cue the crickets. School is in full swing, teachers are dealing with new students and curriculum, and many schools are dealing with massive layoffs.

It is disappointing to see some leaders revel in the bad news by making dubious claims that SB 191 was supposed to make the state a shoe-in for the funds. This is disappointing because they miss the point of SB 191. It wasn’t about securing our chances. It was about reforming how we evaluate teachers.

Yes, the funds would have assisted in implementation of the new evaluation system. So I say screw the Feds (no I am not now writing for the Independence Institute!). It is time for our state legislators to raise revenues to pay for reforms that are necessary to improve student achievement. We also need to defeat the draconian 60 and 61 amendments and proposal 101 that would make the loss of the Race funds look like losing change in the cushions of your couch. Let’s not dwell on what might have been. Let’s not lose our focus!

Popularity: 17% [?]

What next for Colorado?

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

After a rollercoaster ride through education reform in the past year, Colorado learned today that we failed to get Race to the Top funding in the second round. Only two states won funding in the first round, so we could tell ourselves that the first round bar was too high and not feel too shocked about it. But the second round was widely viewed as the consolation prize around here, designed to reward states just like us who had taken politically difficult steps to change the way we “do” education. No one thought we wouldn’t win this time.

So here we are, with grand, hard-won visions, no money to implement them, and bruised egos all around. What do we do now?

Let me suggest what we should NOT do now:

  • Look to place blame on any one person, organization, or set of beliefs. I know many of you from working on education policy in Colorado, and I know that you are working actively to benefit education in Colorado in the best way you know how. We may have different theories of change or preferred strategies, but we would be doing Colorado children a real disservice if we decided to use this disappointing outcome as a political opportunity to drive further wedges among us. We experienced some intriguing moments of working together in crafting our Race to the Top applications – let’s remember that in moving forward.
  • Ram through tough reforms without taking into account the current lack of money to do them well. Reformers will not advance the cause if we do not acknowledge the work involved in true change, and the resources needed to do that work well. Reforms that are implemented poorly become discredited reforms.
  • Use the lack of money as an excuse for maintaining the status quo. Change will certainly be harder, but it remains the right thing to do – we just need to figure out how.

Without seeing individual scores, it’s hard to know what sank our application. My guess is that we’ll find out that our local control system of education governance led to uncertainties about our capacity as a state to get the job done. We’re used to working in that context, but reviewers may have been uncomfortable with it.

So what should we do next?

  • Focus on the collective vision articulated in the Race to the Top applications and put the rest behind us. For all the difficulties and disappointments, Race to the Top really did prod us to come together and articulate what we want for education in Colorado – a valuable result that should not be discarded.
  • Identify what we can do within the current system and get to work.
  • Develop a funding plan for our other objectives that involves both private and public contributions.
  • Continue the difficult conversations we are having around issues like teacher and principal evaluation in a spirit of trust and respect, acting as if we honor others’ commitment to education even when we may disagree about the particulars.

At the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, we have too much talent and commitment in this state to let this stop us. Let’s keep moving forward.

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