Ed asks, “Which will have the bigger impact in education reform: RTT or i3?” (Ed is Watching)

Do charter schools purge undesirable students, as some teachers unions and traditional public school advocates claim? (The DC Education Blog)

I Before E: Can undergraduate, first-year writing courses be taught effectively online? (Inside Higher Ed)

Will the Florida Legislature be able to enforce a teacher pay-for-performance system without withholding state funds from districts that don’t comply? (The Florida Times-Union)

In response to my critique of Diane Ravitch, Andrew Sullivan says:

The last thing we need in this culture, I believe, is a resistance to saying ‘I was wrong.” Or a denigration of those who do so.

That’s in response to this remark:

The problem with “I was wrong about everything” as the prelude to an argument is that it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the repudiator’s judgment. And, in this case, the book simply trades one pre-defined agenda for another: the collected talking points of the reactionary education establishment.

There’s a big difference between saying ‘I was wrong’ and ‘I was wrong about everything.’ It’s the latter admission that forms the predicate of Ravitch’s book, which is why the New York Times wrote a story about it titled “Scholar’s School Reform U-Turn,” the book is back-ordered at Amazon, and so on.

It is, of course, certainly possible to be wrong about everything. And if you come to that realization, the honorable thing to do is admit it. But that should be a chastening experience, something that would make you wary of deciding you were suddenly right about a whole bunch of new things. That’s my criticism of Ravitch. She says she “lost the faith,” but I think it would be more accurate to say that she’s gone through a late-career faith conversion.

Yesterday morning, AEI released a new report on Hispanic college graduation rates co-authored by Andrew Kelly, Mark Schneider, and myself. It shows how many colleges are falling short in helping Hispanic students earn degrees. And not just because of poor high school preparation and economic factors–our analysis found that colleges with similar levels of admissions selectivity have very different rates of success. The report includes interviews with colleges that had both unusually high and unusually low Hispanic graduation rates, as compared to similar institutions. The constrasts are striking. Colleges can make a real difference in helping students earn credentials, if they focus resources and attention in the right way.

Hours later, Congress announced a final compromise deal on student loan reform. In order to pass health care, and accommodate a maddeningly illogical downward estimate in the savings generated by the bill, negotiators gutted the provisions that would have helped improve Hispanic graduation rates. The $3 billion College Access and Completion Fund is gone, and all we’re left with is the uninspiring College Access Challenge Grant, which conspicuously omits the word “completion,” i.e. “graduation.” The president’s historic effort to improve community colleges–where Hispanic students disproportionately enroll–has collapsed. There’s some money for community college-based training programs, and that’s obviously necessary with 10 percent unemployment. But it won’t move the needle on degrees. Perkins loans that would have created incentives to help low-income students graduate? No more. There’s some extra money for minority-serving institutions, but without the kind of accountability provisions that have proven vital to spurring improvement in the past.

If it passes this weekend, the conversion of the federal student loan program from subsidizing for-profit banks to lending money directly to students will be a triumph of good government. The health care bill will be an act of social good without precedent in my lifetime. But make no mistake: If all goes according to plan, the Obama administration will have no higher education agenda to speak of on Monday morning. Everything that might have made the president’s laudable goal of regaining the world lead in college attainment by 2020 more than an empty slogan is about to disappear.

George Will asks some good questions about the Obama Admnistration’s proposal to link $14.5 billion in federal funding to whether a state certifies their education standards as “college- and career-ready” in this New York Post op-ed. He writes:

But how does one fulfill — or know when one has fulfilled — Obama’s goal of “college and career readiness” for every child by 2020?

That gauzy goal resembles the 1994 goal that by 2000 (when, Congress dreamily decreed, every school “will be free of drugs and violence”) every child would start school “ready to learn.” Is “college and career readiness” one goal or two? Should everybody go to college? Is a college degree equivalent to career — any career? — readiness?

Typically the latter half of the “college- and career-ready” slogan is mumbled and forgotten. Partly this is because it’s easier to measure college-readiness than it is career-readiness. If a student goes directly from high school to college but it slotted into remedial coursework, is unable to attain passing grades, and flunks out, we could not honestly say that student was “ready” for college-level work. But if they go into a career, how do we tell if they were “ready” or not?

In my paper looking at this very topic, I propose some solutions to these thorny questions. To begin with, every state has an Unemployment Insurance (UI) system that collects employment and wage information on every single employee in the state. Several states have paired their dataset of community college graduates with UI data to find the student and state return on investment. These studies have been able to say, with real observed outcomes, that students completing an associate’s degree have higher employment rates and earn more money than those completing only a certificate and especially those who drop out altogether.

A few states have seen the value in making this exact same analysis for their high school graduates, and all states could feasibly do so. This would allow every state to know the employment and wage data for their high school graduates. This is not a perfect measure–it would be better to know if a person was employed in a professional career with a path for growth, benefits, and stability, as opposed to just a temporary job–but it would be better than what we have now. It could also be supplemented with professional certifications, licensures, or other ways of showing the student was on a true career path.

As states start to think about balancing college-readiness versus career-readiness, they must be careful not to encourage high schools to track students into less rigorous, easier routes to completion. When I was creating a new index for Florida, for example, I weighted the college-readiness portion about two and a half times more than the career-readiness portion. I did this for three reasons. One, I think college is important and a viable way for young adults to improve their life prospects. Two, research has shown that employers consider career-ready skills to be strikingly similar to college-readiness.

Three, I chose this particular weighting because it reflected reality. Florida high school graduates are about two and a half times as likely to start college full-time as they are to begin full-time employment. Nearly two-thirds go directly into some form of postsecondary education (public four-year, private four-year, public two-year, etc.) while only about a quarter choose to enter the workforce directly. If a high school sent all their graduates into the workforce, those students would already be well behind their peers. High schools must have accountability incentives to at least match the current reality and, as more students enter college directly from high school (or if a state wants to accelerate this trend), a state should gradually increase the importance of the college-readiness measures in relation to the career-ready ones.

As states continue to adopt “college- and career-ready” standards, they must begin to think through some of the issues in applying those same standards to their accountability systems.

The District of Columbia seeks Master Educators to serve as third-party evaluators of teacher performance and to provide teachers with targeted support. Important implications for the city’s new teacher evaluation program.

Only 1 out of every 2 Hispanic students graduates in six years. How can that ratio be upped? (Rick Hess Straight Up)

Has reading been “bastardized?” (Core Knowledge)

What has four decades of the federal government’s involvement in education accomplished?  George Will stubbornly, predictably asks the hard questions. (The Washington Post)

The brouhaha over Diane Ravitch’s one-eighty rages on.  Where do you stand? (The New Republic)

Brookings released a report calling for a national corps of teachers—a new federal program estimated to cost about $200 million per year to support about 19,000 teachers. The idea behind “America’s Teacher Corps” is to give recognition, more money ($10,000 annually) and a portable credential to teachers who have shown strong performance based on a strong evaluation system and accept teaching positions in high-poverty Title I schools (they would not need to take any more coursework or any additional exams).What’s different is that the goal of the ATC is not to reward good teaching and attract more teachers to teaching, although these are hoped for and expected outcomes, but to improve evaluation systems. The theory is that teachers who are not eligible for ATC, those who can’t show the requisite “sustained superior performance” because they work in districts without established evaluation systems, will push for better teacher evaluation systems in their own districts. Add to this a leadership component (like the principal corps we proposed a couple of years ago) to ensure that ATC teachers are in schools where they can continue to succeed, and this seems like a decent plan for spreading good teachers to places that need them.

Speaking of spreading around teachers, a bill was recently introduced by Rep. Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico that would create a competitive grant program to fund teacher exchanges between school districts in different regions of the United States. The “Teacher Exchange Act of 2010″ would establish the program under the U.S. Department of Education to the tune of $20 million to support the exchange of some 1,000 teachers each year. To qualify for the exchange program, teachers would have to have at least three years of classroom experience—doesn’t seem that they need to show any evidence of anything like “sustained superior performance”—perhaps marry this idea to the ATC?– but they do need to agree to return to their home district for at least two years following the year-long exchange posting. For all the states and districts that don’t have enough bilingual teachers for their rapidly growing Spanish-language dominant ELL students, this could help with those shortages. And it could certainly help Puerto Rico, where roughly 20 percent of all English classes are taught by unqualified teachers.

Still need more teachers? Hire professors. Like Troops to Teachers, the university faculty to school teacher “alternative pathway” seems like a ripe one when you consider all of those economics and English professors who haven’t quite reached tenure and, alas, are getting the boot as colleges and universities start to cut non-tenured (and even tenured!) faculty to save their budgets. Add to that the PhD candidates and recent PhDs that will be looking for jobs that don’t exist anymore and you’ve got a whole new pipeline. Public schools should be scooping up these content experts while they can.

The University of Iowa* fired basketball coach Todd Lickliter (affectionately known as “Coach Lick”) earlier this week after three straight losing seasons, the first time that’s happened at Iowa since the 1930s. Lickliter was a basketball coach and so should be judged on the results of his team, but it’s worthwhile to remember that he was employed by an academic institution. Unfortunately, academics are rarely what matter in major college sports. None of the news stories around Coach Lick’s firing mentioned how his players did off the court (except in courtrooms). His contract further illustrates this point. It contained up to $400,000 in bonuses for on-court performance but less than half that amount for academic incentives. Not to mention the fact that his base salary, at $1.2 million, made him one of the highest paid public employees in the state. It’s an unfortunate reminder this time of year that in college basketball, it’s more about the basketball than the college.

*my alma mater

It’s tragic that our country — home of Silicon Valley and countless technology innovations — lags in broadband penetration and speed. The new National Broadband Plan, released today, tries to offer solutions. Importantly, the plan focuses not just on technology, but the actual uses of that technology. It includes an entire section for education-related recommendations, with a nice set of ideas to improve the E-rate program. The plan’s big three recommendations:

• Expand access to broadband with common sense reforms (E-rate)
• Improve access to high-quality, online instruction
• Unlock the power of educational data

I’m particularly fond of this component of the data recommendations:

Privacy and data protection laws for students and their families need to be modernized to reap the full benefit of improved information flow about student performance while still fully protecting student data. For example, organizations offer tutoring and supplemental services to students, but the legal status of the data they collect is unclear. Issues include whether parents and regulators have the same rights to the data as they have with school records. A relatively small change in the law to allow parents to combine data from outside sources with school data would provide a richer picture of students’ learning needs so all providers can support them effectively. There may also be cases in which fine-grained levels of privacy control are appropriate. For example, students should be able to select and share their best work with other educational institutions, the military or future employers from within their digital portfolios or other materials linked to electronic educational records.

Privacy protections are essential. But if we are serious about serving highly mobile students and want a variety of school, afterschool, and community organizations to work together in an integrated, cohesive fashion to support student learning, we have to find a way for those closest to our students—teachers, parents, tutors, youth workers, etc.—to share information, insights, and align actions.

President Johnson signs the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. (Image from Harvard Gazette)

ESEA: Is it just a series of vote-buying programs and failed top-down control of schools? (Cato@Liberty)  Or will a new version of the federal education law help drive innovation and experimentation? (Center for American Progress)

Which teacher evaluation reforms did an L.A. Unified task force recently recommend?  Will the school board sign on? (Los Angeles Times)

Can a private college go for-profit while maintaining its traditional structure (i.e., no online salesmanship)? (Inside Higher Ed)

Should teachers unions be eligible to run charter schools? (Eduwonk)