Given vast amounts of stimulus money for K–12 education, the Obama administration has chosen to use those resources to advance its education agenda—specifically, to eliminate state laws that artificially limit the number of charter schools and that prevent the evaluation of teachers using student test scores. Sam Dillon reports that:
The administration’s stance has caught by surprise educators and officials who had hoped that Mr. Obama’s calls during the campaign for an overhaul of the No Child law would mean a reduced federal role and less reliance on standardized testing.
The administration’s stance should surprise no one. In September 2008, at the height of the campaign, Obama said, “as President, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.” In March 2008, analyzing the Clinton and Obama stances on education, I wrote:
Clinton and Obama are using words that appeal to widespread dissatisfaction with NCLB among Democractic primary voters—”unfunded mandate,” “single high-stakes standardized” etc.—without actually promising to unequivocally dismantle the law. It’s not like such a position isn’t available. Bill Richardson simply pledged to “Scrap No Child Left Behind.” Dennis Kucinich said “My election will mean the end of No Child Left Behind as a way of achieving the education of our children.”
Obama used no such words, and lo and behold he’s not interested in scrapping NCLB. And the use of stimulus funds to influence policy is hardly shocking. Federal policymakers are taking advantage of a particular moment in time—states are broke and need money—to advance their agenda. That’s federalism. And given that state and local governments still control nearly 90% of the money, we’re in little danger of total takeover from DC.
Yet education historian Diane Ravitch (who’s making excellent progress in establishing herself as the go-to name-brand anti-Obama quote on K–12 issues) disagrees. Why? Because apparently she thinks education federalism itself is a problem. Here is Ravitch’s official comment about Race to the Top:
Dear DOE,
I wish to register a strong objection to these regulations. As a former federal official (I was Assistant Secretary of Education in 1991–92), I object to the coercive nature, in which the federal government is dictating education policy to the states. But of great importance, the policies you are dictating are not based on evidence.
You want states to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, but you present no evidence that doing so improves achievement; instead you rely on economists who project that it might do so. To achieve this goal, you tell states that they must roll back laws they have passed. This oversteps the bounds of federal authority in education.
Similarly your pressure to open charter schools goes beyond any evidence that charter schools are superior to regular public schools. The recent Stanford study by Margaret Raymond found that only 17% of charter schools were better than nearby public schools. Why then should schools eliminate their caps on charters?
I think the DOE should respect the requirements of federalism and look to states to offer their best ideas rather than mandating policies that the current administration likes, even though there is no evidence to support them.
Humility is sometimes the best policy, especially when you are not on firm ground with your remedies.
Diane Ravitch
No state has ever really tied teacher evaluations to test scores in a methodologically valid way and made those evaluations meaningful in terms of compensation, hiring, tenure, and other things people care about. So Ravitch is just engaging in garden variety chicken-and-egg obstructionism: you can’t prove X works because nobody’s ever tried it; you can’t try X because nobody’s ever proved it works.
The problem with charter caps is this: in a given market you tend to get a certain number of parents with a strong but fairly undifferentiated desire to get their child out the public school system and into a charter school. So artificially limiting the supply with caps amounts to propping up the worst charter schools while limiting the ability of the best to replicate and expand.
And one would think that an education historian might at least acknowledge that throughout the 20th century the “best ideas” of many states when it came to K–12 education amounted to creating and preserving a system of vicious institutionalized racism, a system that only ended when the federal government decided to stop “respecting the rights of federalism” and began “overstepping the bounds of federal authority in education” and “dictating education policy to the states” via means a whole lot more coercive than dangling money in front of legislatures, i.e. force of arms.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
[...] it on the blogosphere, but it has become too easy for “hard-charging reformers” to dismiss those who decline to ride the bandwagon as in favor of the status quo, ill-informed, enemies or [...]
Charter schools are an attractive CHOICE to many poor/minority families in our urban districts because they allow parents to transfer their children out of disastrous urban public schools with regulations that protect trouble-making students by allowing them to continue to disrupt the class and prevent other students from learning. Good or bad, the regulations that allow these problem students to remain in regular public schools are the big attraction for parents to haul their children out of these schools and place them in charter schools. Charter schools have rules they can adhere to. They call their own shots as to who they keep and who they can terminate once the lottery has taken place. Public schools are not afforded this luxury. This freedom given to charter administrators is the big attraction no one is talking about. This CHOICE, by the way, has previously been available only to families of wealth. Now that poor/minority families have a choice beyond parochial school for their children, I would contend Obama and Duncan are on the right track by demanding states lift their charter caps in order to be eligible for RTTT monies. Just because families are poor this should not preclude them from sending their children to schools with a degree of decorum or a reasonable level law and order prevail. I applaud Obama and Duncan fro recognizing this fact and attempting to do something about it that can benefit many urban youngsters.
As for test scores being used to evaluate the (in)effectiveness of teachers, I am also a huge supporter of Obama and Duncan on this policy. The existing system US public schools employ to evaluate teachers is an embarrassment to the teaching profession, an absolute embarrassment. Anything, I repeat, ANYTHING would be an improvement over the subjective evaluation system used to embellish the performance of 99.5% of every public school teacher in America. IT MUST BE TERMINATED.
Are there problems and/or potholes with using test scores in evaluating teachers? Of course there are. But this strategy needs time to develop.
First and foremost, hold the high stakes decisions that could potentially be attached to these scores in abeyance for some predetermined grace period (i.e two to three years). Use the test scores only to help improve instruction. No one loses their job or is denied tenure during this grace period until many/most of the potential problems can be remedied. Tweak this new system. Amend it from one year to the next but don’t end it. Refine it over time. Folks like William Sanders have worked to improve value-added-assessments and they’re close – very close to being what we need to determine the effectiveness of our teachers.
With all due respect to Diane Ravitch, and I have nothing but the utmost regard for her body of work, I believe she’s being a bit hasty on RTTT and her judgments on this program I consider to be premature.
As a former federal official (I was Assistant Secretary of Education in 1991–92), I object to the coercive nature, in which the federal government is dictating education policy to the states.
Coercive? Dictating? If a state wants to avoid “Race to the Top” regs, all it needs to do is not take the money. And given the relatively small amount of money at stake (less than 1% of the yearly national spending on education), that shouldn’t be hard.
Also note that the CREDO study on charter schools found that students new to charter schools had a small dip in performance, but their performance rose in subsequent years. As an overall average, it’s true that 17% of charter schools did “better,” but that’s ignoring the fact that the longer kids were in charter schools, the better they did.
Finally, anyone else notice the implicit contradiction in Ravitch’s arguments? In the space of two paragraphs, she argues that 1) it’s not fair to evaluate teachers by test scores alone, even while 2) herself evaluating the worth of charter schools by test scores alone. In any event, as informed scholars know, research is finding that charter schools have strong benefits for attainment (high school graduation, etc.). See, e.g., http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2008/RAND_WR610.pdf
[...] The Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey attempts to take on Diane Ravitch’s criticism of Race to the Top, accusing her [...]
Those who have commented before me have already covered most of my objections. However, I believe that they’ve left one out.
Mr. Carey writes, “So Ravitch is just engaging in garden variety chicken-and-egg obstructionism: you can’t prove X works because nobody’s ever tried it; you can’t try X because nobody’s ever proved it works.” But that is not the dynamic in question here.
It is not merely a case of banning a practice or allowing it. Rather, it is a case of mandating it. Require — of pressuring very strongly — states to adopt policies that are unproven is the issue. We knew that seat belts save lives, so requiring states to adopt seatbelt laws made sense. We knew that lowering speed limits saved gas, so requiring states to lower theirs to 55mph made sense. But that is not the case here.
The original idea being caps on charter schools was to try them out to see if they work, to see if they produce better outcomes that non-charter public schools. Well, we’ve done a lot of research and when we control for the most basic demographic factors we find that most charter schools do not. Charter schools are each supposed to be an experiment, but charters schools generally were supposed to be one big experiment — and that’s we had the caps.
Now, given all the evidence that charter schools are generally not superior to non-charter public schools — and quite a bit a evidence that that are inferior — the Arne Duncan and President Obama as demanding that states lift those caps.
States are already free to link teacher evaluation or compensation to student outcomes — even to achievment scores. Some have looked at that and realized that we lack the technology (i.e. appropriate tests with instructional sensitivity) and therefore should not do it, regardless of how attractive the idea seems. Others have not taken a stand, leaving school districts to try it out. Why should the feds demand we implement programs across the country without trying them first.
Isn’t that was federalism was supposed to be about. Individual states can try their own versions of things — another expample of little experiments. The national government insisting upon uniform policy at the state level is hardly federalism at all. And when it is untested policy, it’s not even smart.
Diana Senechal is correct in pointing out that Diane Ravitch’s letter is not a defense of “states rights” but a condemnation of the DOE’s exceeding its legitimate power by demanding that states repeal their laws and abandon their principles in order to receive stimulus funds. Out of wisdom and experience states that have such laws created them to protect their citizens and teachers from those who wish to destroy public education. I would also remind you that even after the stimulus funds are distributed, states and local communities will still be paying most of the public school costs, so they are the ones who should be “calling the tune.”
The DOE’s and your argument for using test scores as part of teacher evaluation—even experimentally– is illogical and unfair, since many factors beside teaching affect how students perform on tests, most prominently their socio-economic status. The foreseeable results of using test scores this way are that all teachers would resort to year round test-prep in self defense and smart teachers would avoid placement in high poverty schools at all costs.
In advocating for more charter schools you set up a false premise in which parents are harmed by not having a greater choice of schools for their children. You forget that there is a finite number of tax dollars allocated for schools in all states, and that opening up more charter schools would spread those dollars thinner, adversely affecting both public schools and existing charter schools. As it is, most states and local communities are too lax about demanding accountability from charter schools and closing down the ones that are not working.
Finally, you ridicule Ravitch for not recognizing that school segregation was promoted by states and abolished by the federal government. Separating people by race was not an educational idea, nor was its practice limited to educational institutions. It was a remnant of cultural and pseudoscientific beliefs that had to be outlawed on a national basis. I find it unconscionable that you equate the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the ideological and self-serving proposals that the DOE is trying to foist on American public education.
Diane Ravitch responds:
Time for a history lesson, boys.
The federal government did not intervene to eliminate state-sponsored racial segregation in the mid-1960s just because the Johnson administration thought it was a good idea. It acted forcefully for two reasons: first, because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional and followed up with additional decisions; and second, because the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Thus, the Johnson administration had the legal authority to enforce decisions of the Supreme Court and the laws of the United States government.
To compare this series of events to the Obama administration’s decision to use nearly $5 billion to bribe states to do what the administration wants to do is simply ahistorical and wrong.
The Obama administration wants states to change their laws limiting the number of privately-managed charter schools and to change their laws that prevent the evaluation of teachers based on student test scores. These policy preferences are not based on any court decisions nor any enactments by Congress. As it happens, they are not supported by social science evidence or experience. They are simply hunches and preferences, nothing more.
Anyone who believes that the U.S. Department of Education has the wisdom to run the nation’s schools and dictate their every policy lacks understanding of and respect for the nature of our federal system of government, and is ignorant of history as well.
Diane Ravitch
The Business Roundtable, which has directed the attack on public education is now deeply enmeshed in an existential struggle to save itself. So the CEO’s have turned their school privatization campaign over to the US government and Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan soldiers on with the dead-end corporate catechism. Charter schools are good, public school teachers are bad, and their unions need to stop their resistance to merit pay. Duncan has pledged to use billions of taxpayers money to close inner-city public schools and make sure those really bad teachers in those schools finally get their comeuppance.
But Duncan will fail just as the Business Roundtable, Gates, Broad, and the Waltons have failed because these forces have tried to hold back the tide of history. Economic globalization had been at the very foundation of the business model for schools, charters, vouchers, data driven instruction, merit pay, standardized testing, and most perversely of all, paying students to consume the corporate version of knowledge. It was the reason Bill Gates and the Walton family were among the driving forces behind these counterproductive educational policies. Big Business wanted a profit making private school system in their race with China and India to lowest possible wage for workers, Gates wanted contracts for his data-collection company Microsoft.
These Milton Friedman-inspired Reagan revolutionaries will mark the Bush years as the zenith of their power. This era spit up hucksters and charlatans like Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, Armstrong Williams, Jack Welch, Ruby K. Payne, and more ominously for the future, Arne Duncan. It was certainly the time the attack on public education appeared ready to bear fruit. They had public school system wreckers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein in place, kids were dropping out in droves, and teachers were in full flight.
But something happened on the way to a global economy and a privatized education system to serve it. The whole thing fell apart. The plans made during the era when Wal-Mart and China were on their honeymoon and the credit default swaps and champagne were flowing on Wall Street and Bill Gates and Eli Broad thought they were destined to rule the world because they were richer than everyone else are canceled.
When a massive systemic effort like globalization dies its like a Hummer that has run out of gas. It will continue rolling down the road awhile longer. And that accounts for the absurdities that are coming out of charter-loving US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s mouth now. His tune will soon change though.
Because soon it will be every private school and charter school investor for himself. Private school students are being moved to the public schools by their debt ridden parents in significant numbers already. Obama’s education policy reflects the President’s own inability to yet grasp that the world he used to live in is about to evaporate. He himself will soon be fighting off the coup makers in the midst of the greatest economic dislocation the American people have ever experienced, the Greatest Depression.
Diane Ravitch and whoever this Kevin Carey is, and his last paragraph should be given an award named after Dr. Irwin Corey, battle on the plain of states’ rights. Ridiculous, federalism is irrelevant now that we live in the corporate state. This is an economic struggle.
Clearly the Obama administration is pressing for a larger role for the Federal government in many aspects of our lives. Some may favor a larger role for the Federal DOE in school policy decisions and some may not. But if Obama will impose specific policies, why not choose them from the list of proven approaches maintained by the Department of Ed? Pre-K, smaller class sizes, etc. It makes no sense to compel states to impose unproven policies. Carey’s arguments are unconvincing.
It is obvious to many that the federal government should not be pushing policies on our states with no research support. The Race to the Top guidelines are designed to promote a particular set of programs based not on any evidence that they work — but on the narrow set of biases of the inside-the-beltway crowd which this blog epitomizes.
Indeed, there have been states like North Carolina that have tried to base teacher incentive pay based on test scores, with a growth model no less, and the results have been overwhelmingly negative, leading to higher teacher attrition in high-neds schools. In many districts such as NYC the explosive growth of charter schools is now ripping communities apart — and depriving our regular public schools of both resources and space.
Your argument that the mediocre record of charter school achievement is the result of a cap on charters is ridiculous. If states cannot regulate bad charters out of business, and if the competition model doesn’t force them to close, what’s the point of opening more anyway? Where’s the accountability?
What would you argue if the record of charter schools was impressive? That the caps should stay? Instead, whatever the facts, you devise a specious argument to argue for more charters.
Duncan is making a big mistake in pushing this privatization agenda so hard and allying himself with Sharpton and Gingrich in the process. When has an unregulated free market produced more equality?
I believe that you have misconstrued and misrepresented Diane Ravitch’s statement as a defense of states’ rights. Her point is clear: “I object to the coercive nature, in which the federal government is dictating education policy to the states. But of great importance, the policies you are dictating are not based on evidence.”
Ravitch presents two aspects of the problem. One is the coercive nature of the “Race to the Top” stimulus package. The other is the lack of evidence supporting the agenda itself. Both of these are essential to Ravitch’s point.
Now, “lack of evidence” does not mean the Obama/Duncan agenda has not been tried. Charter schools have been tried in great numbers across the country, and the results have been mixed. Likewise, there are numerous studies of value-added data, also with mixed results. Thus it is wrong to call Ravitch’s argument “chicken-and-egg obstructionism.”
Ravitch objects to both the content of the reforms and the manner in which they are being imposed. This is not a defense of states’ rights, nor a condemnation of federalism. It is a call for a thoughtful and careful approach to education reform. It is a shame that it was read so carelessly.
[...] Is Diane Ravitch’s opposition to Obama’s education policies all about states’ rights? [...]