Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about Missouri’s education leadership shake-up and what comes next. They discuss how to find the right commissioner of education, why outside reformers tend to succeed where insiders struggle, what the dismantling of the US Department of Education means for state accountability systems, why public complacency about poor academic outcomes persists, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much, Andy Smarick, for joining once again on the Show-Me Institute Podcast. We love having you on and I appreciate you taking the time. You’re a busy man, so it’s really wonderful to have you back.

Andy Smarick (00:06):
I love being here. It’s a treat. Thank you for having me. I always like talking to you, but also anytime I get to talk about state-level education policy, it’s a treat.

Susan Pendergrass (00:19):
Well, I know that you have experience serving on a couple of state boards, both K-12 and higher ed. Just to bring you up to speed on what’s happening in Missouri: we have a relatively new governor, about a year in, and we had a state board of education where people stayed in expired seats, rubber-stamped decisions, and were very complacent, I feel comfortable saying. Our governor shook up that group and appointed new people who came in and said, what do you mean we don’t have bylaws? It was like, this is bananas. At the same time, the governor issued an executive order requiring letter grades on schools and districts, new school report cards. I don’t know exactly how everything went down, but our Commissioner of Education resigned, our Deputy Commissioner resigned, and our president of the state board of education resigned, all in about one week. So we are now straightening things out and there is a new board president. But this new, relatively new board now has the task of finding a commissioner. The way things have happened in Missouri is we always get a new commissioner from the ranks of the state education agency, maybe from the legislature, always from Missouri. Just a real this-is-how-we’ve-done-it mentality. And we have not been big reformers. No Chiefs for Change in Missouri. Like a lot of states, our reading scores for young kids are tanking, forty percent below basic for third and fourth graders. We have a state accountability system called the Missouri School Improvement Plan in which 516 of our 520 districts are fully accredited and about four are provisionally accredited, none unaccredited. So we have this meaningless accountability system where every district is fully accredited, even St. Louis, which I can’t even go into. So here we are, and I want to know a few things from you. Number one, if you were on the Board of Education in Missouri, how would you go about finding a new commissioner? What would you look for? And then later I want to get into what’s happening at the national level. We are not doing well academically, we have never had a bold reformer in charge, we keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. What would you do if you were in their spot?

Andy Smarick (02:59):
So in education, I’m going to wind up to this answer, so just bear with me for a second. Conservative can mean two different things. One is the traditional conservative view, which is to preserve, to stand athwart big, swift, dramatic, perpetual change. You’re trying to keep things the way they are because there’s a lot of wisdom that has gone into it and people are accustomed to it. In education, there’s also this other right-of-center conservative view, which is we have to be much more open to choice, competition, accountability metrics, and so on. And it seems that Missouri has been one of those very red states that has tended to believe in the first kind of conservatism: protect our traditional school districts, protect the hierarchies we have, protect the tradition of you grow up as a professional, as a teacher, then a superintendent, then maybe go to the state education agency. A lot of people believe that’s the way to do it.

There probably is an ethic among a lot of people to keep it that way. The only way you get out of that is if there’s a recognition among leadership that we can’t continue to preserve the status quo, that we have to change some things. That is a big step for a place that has elevated the idea of preserving for a very long time. If they get to that step, then they have to do the very tough things, which is start to pull out the Jenga pieces of that conservatism. The most important one is having board leadership and having a state superintendent who come from outside the state, and then having a board chair or board president who is not going to just do what the staff of the state education agency says or what the district superintendents say. We saw this work quite well about fifteen or twenty years ago. There was a big movement nationwide in educational reform led at the state level, and a number of states chose out-of-state superintendents and commissioners of education who did a terrific job of shaking things up and advancing a bunch of important proposals. The downside is a lot of them were so brash and so young, and I have to say so cocky, that they made unnecessary waves and kicked a lot of people in the shins in the states where they landed. So my view is a place like Missouri should pick someone from out of state for a state chief, someone with a long track record of success, but someone who isn’t so green as to think he or she knows everything. Someone with enough humility and enough time on task to know what they don’t know, and who can come in and be bold enough to make some changes, but not think that everyone in the state is a dummy who needs to be ignored. That’s how I would think about it. And if you have a board chair and board membership who get all of this, it makes things a whole lot easier. But that might be the hardest part of all. Who is your board president? Who are the board majority going to be? They have to be the ones with the backbone.

Susan Pendergrass (05:57):
Yeah. I feel like we’ve had people come in and say, well, I’m only the commissioner, it’s not my fault that the kids don’t read. And then people say, well, we’re a local control state, so it’s really the local guys’ fault that the kids can’t read. Then the legislators are like, well, who’s supposed to be making sure the kids can read? And technically, kind of they are, but them plus the board, and there’s just fingers pointing every different direction with nobody really taking responsibility. If we had the capacity for hard things, we would not have all of our districts be fully accredited. There’s even pushback on the letter grade idea because folks will say, well, then the teachers in those F schools feel bad and the parents feel bad and the kids who go there feel bad. I’ve seen some states change it to colors or something where nobody feels bad. I’ve also heard folks say it’s racist because a lot of the D and F schools enroll large percentages of students of color. So there are just all of these reasons to resist. It’s going to happen because there’s an executive order, but I feel like we’re going to have a hard time finding somebody who’s willing to do those things.

Andy Smarick (07:17):
Well, your state, like every other state, has a state constitution that makes the state ultimately responsible for education. Your state, like others, has both tradition and some laws that give a number of powers to local districts. The weird thing, and I’ve seen this in a lot of different states, is the state government ends up in a very weird position. The state can get sued and state leaders can get criticized if kids aren’t learning, because the state actually has constitutional authority to make sure kids are learning. But as a matter of practice, and often of state statutes, a lot of this power is delegated to districts. States then try to recapture some of that power through the accreditation system. It’s the way the state can say, okay, districts, you have the power to do these things, but we’re going to hold you accountable for results and we’re going to accredit you or not. And then it turns out it’s virtually impossible to take away the accreditation of these districts because of legislative pushback, and the state typically doesn’t have the capacity to run a district if it does take away accreditation. It just becomes a complete hot mess. That’s why you need state leadership who has some experience but also some backbone to say, this is how we’re going to thread the needle of state authority, state responsibility, local control, and still making sure that kids learn. This is not easy, other states have gone through it, but it isn’t the kind of thing that someone who has lived in Missouri all their life and grown up professionally there can do easily. It’s going to be hard for that person to get out of that box. Having someone from the outside who can start to do some bold things, including hiring smart, tough lawyers, having board leadership who’s going to stick by it. But I just want to emphasize this point: every state I ever talk to begins by saying, well, you know, we’re a local control state, our districts have all the power. Everybody says that. Go back to your state constitution. The state is the one that’s going to be responsible. And if the state has the backbone, it can do a whole lot. But whether it has the backbone is the operative phrase.

Susan Pendergrass (09:41):
Yeah. So about seven years ago we developed our own school report cards with letter grades, called MOSchoolRankings. I’ll just plug it. It was with GPAs, and this year for the first time I just took the GPAs and converted them to letter grades because folks found GPAs tricky. I put up the methodology. I took all the data from our state education agency, DESE, and just tried to make it a map you can zoom in and out on, easier to navigate. And my thinking is you have to do these things, make sure you say how you do it, and then people can argue with you and debate whether it’s right or wrong or good or bad. And many people have. A lot of people don’t like that the average is a C. I’m open to discussing why the average should be anything other than a C, but you have to at some point just make the move and then be confident enough in what you did that you can defend it and change it if people point out flaws. But this is where I think we struggle at DESE. They struggle to just put that out there because they worry about every negative outcome and consequence. And it’s like, yeah, but at some point to not do it is worse than to do it.

Andy Smarick (11:10):
For sure. And I’ve gotten to the point of realizing that if you have been in a system at different ranks for thirty or thirty-five years, all of your friends, your reputation, your pension, your income, everything about your identity is wrapped up with that system. Expecting these folks to suddenly turn the corner and say, you know, we’ve messed up, tens of thousands of kids are not learning right now today in classrooms, and we have to start holding the adults accountable for that, including teachers and principals and local school board members and local superintendents, and we have to be courageous about it. That’s asking a lot of people who are of, by, and for the system. It can be a whole lot easier if you just get someone from the outside with the courage to do it.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54):
Yeah. So can you think of an example of a state that has done this well?

Andy Smarick (12:02):
Definitely during the late No Child Left Behind era and then the Race to the Top era, a number of states found people from outside. Tennessee was famous for this. Arne Duncan ended up going to a couple of different places, including Rhode Island. New Jersey ended up picking Chris Cerf. There was a movement where probably ten or fifteen states did this quite well. My state, Maryland, brought in the superintendent of Mississippi after Mississippi had had so many gains, so she could carry some of those especially reading reforms to our state. This is not uncommon. Texas did something like this for a while. Louisiana became very famous during the John White era for doing this. But in all of these cases it began often with a governor, and then some members of a state legislature who said, we just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve done in the past. We have to do things differently. Once the governor says something like that, he or she can appoint people to the Board of Education who will do things differently, and the legislature, at least his or her party, will start to fall in line, and the media then starts to understand how serious it is. It is hard to do this without the governor leaning forward and giving the blessing to the bureaucracy to do things differently. So the question for you is, is your governor going to spend any political capital on this and say things are messed up and we have to do things differently?

Susan Pendergrass (13:29):
I don’t know. I hope so. But I haven’t seen evidence of that. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that they’re looking more internally than externally. However, I just want to add one wrinkle to this context that we’ve been thinking a lot about at the Show-Me Institute. If you’re following the US Department of Education, I believe you used to work there. Is that right?

Andy Smarick (13:54):
Yes, back in the day.

Susan Pendergrass (13:55):
Last week they moved the Office of Special Education over to the Department of Health and Human Services. They moved the Office of Civil Rights over to the Department of Justice. The building where the Department of Education used to be is now vacated. All those people are over at an old Department of Energy building. It’s a significantly reduced staff. Without touching the Every Student Succeeds Act, they are effectively dismantling most of the structure over there, at a time when the current president said that sending education back to the states was one of his priorities. I’m particularly concerned that at a time when Missouri has this vacuum, we could be looking at the apron strings being cut, states being told to sink or swim from the federal perspective. You don’t have to maintain the accountability systems. The Secretary is encouraging states to submit requests to waive parts of the law. I don’t really know exactly where it’s headed, but that concerns me. Do you think they’re going to let off the gas on mandated accountability systems in exchange for flexibility?

Andy Smarick (15:15):
Such a good question. To begin with just some editorializing: it is astonishing that Congress has allowed this to happen. In general I’m a big fan of decentralizing education power to the states, but that they’ve been able to administratively dismantle a department without Congress doing anything about it is just shocking to me. Even members of the Republican Party twenty years ago, let alone forty or sixty years ago, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the legislative branch to create departments and fund departments, would have been appalled at this. There would have been unanimous consent to stop this from happening. So that says a lot that Congress has just sort of excused itself from the discussion. It has been remarkable the extent to which that building where we used to work, and the thousands of people there, is just empty, and they are handing off all the tasks to other places. I don’t know how this is legal, but I guess they’re figuring out a way to do it.

Now, the people who are leading this from inside genuinely believe that education will be better off if Uncle Sam isn’t meddling in it so much. That requires a theory of action, or at least a theory, that the reason why things are bad is that Uncle Sam is causing them to be bad, as though if Uncle Sam backs up there’s going to be a sunnier future ahead. Or it requires believing that it is just morally wrong for Uncle Sam to get involved, and whether states sink or swim after he gets out, that’s up to them. That’s a theory, it’s an ideological approach, and they have the right to pursue it. Donald Trump was elected and he gets to hire who he wants to. But then, to your point, it starts to implicate the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still requires the federal government to do some things related to state accountability systems. And if you believe you have the power administratively to undo a cabinet department, I suspect you probably believe you have the power to ignore some federal accountability provisions and just allow states to do what they want. So we’re going to be left in this position of saying, all right, the federal government is getting out of the business of accountability, therefore the states need to do it well. And then anyone who cares about kids learning will ask, okay, are states going to do this well? And so I turn to you as a state leader. Is Missouri going to

Susan Pendergrass (17:23):
Yeah.

Andy Smarick (17:47):
kick butt and take names?

Susan Pendergrass (17:48):
I’m concerned. I mean, No Child Left Behind was difficult and a lot of people didn’t like it, but test scores went up. Strict accountability, test scores went up. As we backed off, the Race to the Top era with waivers, and then Every Student Succeeds, which allowed more waivers, states were able to lower a lot of bars. Some states raised bars, like you mentioned, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some states are doing a great job, especially with early literacy. Others are not. And so Missouri, I think of it like this: you have a college student and you’re paying all their bills. You’re writing the checks, ordering their textbooks, doing all that work. Then one day you say, you know what, instead of that, I’m going to give you $3,000 a month: you pay your rent, your utilities, get your own books. There are going to be kids who step up and do fine. And there are going to be a lot of kids who take that $3,000 and immediately go to Cancun. We know this. It kind of depends on what you’ve done with the kids so far. And I feel like we have lulled the states into a feeling of compliance. If we just tell you how we spend our Title I dollars, fill out this form, and report that our test scores keep going down, no one cares. There’s no stick. They don’t withhold the money. We just say our test scores this year are lower than last year, and they say, good to know, here’s your

Andy Smarick (19:14):
Yep.

Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
check. So if that’s how you were raising your kids so far, why would you expect them to step up and become suddenly responsible?

Andy Smarick (19:31):
Okay, I have to admit that I have learned a hard lesson in my years doing education policy, which is that I was wrong that the political system of its own volition will always push for big action to make sure schools are great. I believed that if we had accountability systems showing that schools were underperforming, there would be a perpetual energy within the public to say we have to fix this, that it was just a matter of making the knowledge available and then everything else would take care of itself. It turns out it just doesn’t work that way. You need leaders at the top to constantly push and say, we are not doing well enough, we have to do dramatic things to make sure kids are going to be better off. Otherwise, No Child Left Behind is in place for a while and then people get sick of it. Or you have some interesting testing regimes and then there’s pushback to that, or just resistance to Uncle Sam in general. And people like the two of us say, but kids aren’t learning anything anymore. We are seeing a cratering of student learning since the peak of No Child Left Behind’s learning gains. This is horrible. Kids just aren’t learning anymore. The Andy of twenty years ago would have assumed the nation would revolt and say, how dare we do this to our schools and our kids, we have to do something differently. Instead, I don’t want to say it’s crickets, but there has not been a major wave of energy to change things again. The only way to do this is for governors or presidents to say this is not good enough and keep pushing. It is the ultimate dog that didn’t bark. The story is why something isn’t happening. If things are so bad in student learning, why is there not a dramatic energy within the public to do things differently? So maybe I look to you. In Missouri, are people just satisfied? Do they just not want the hassle?

Susan Pendergrass (21:28):
Why do you think? Yeah, they are like, we love our schools. All the time: we love our schools. We love, love, love our rural schools. It’s hard, kids show up with a lot of baggage, it’s just hard. But we love our schools. God forbid we have tiny districts getting below fifty kids. We love it. There isn’t an appetite to say, well, thirty-some percent of our rural high schools don’t offer calculus, and we don’t think we need it. It’s like, well, those kids are going to join a world where a lot of other kids had access to these things. It’s just, I don’t know the word. Complacency for sure. And it gets exhausting to continue to talk about it because it feels like

Andy Smarick (22:20):
Yeah. So this is why it can feel that way. And listen, if I were a state superintendent, based on the things I have learned, I would always begin a big reform movement by saying, first, all of the things you just said, but sincerely, because I believe this. I would say I love our public schools. I know how much they do for kids. I know that we love our teachers. I know that these schools are part of the community. I know that they help shape young people in ways beyond reading and math scores. I know that we love to go to these sports events. I know that we love to go to our fifth-grade graduation. This is an important strand in the fabric of our community. We love these schools, we love our teachers, we need to protect them, and we have to do better. What I found in that previous movement of big, dramatic out-of-state actors who came in and took over is they were awesome at the we-have-to-do-better part and absolutely lousy at the we-love-the-schools-and-teachers part. And that just caused a lot of anger. It was toxic in the long run. It is so important to a state to hear the we-love-our-schools message. That’s why they end up picking leaders, board presidents and superintendents who are of the system, who sincerely love their schools and say that. But they’re bad at the second part: we have to do things differently. The key to leadership right now is finding someone who can say both. We love these schools. We love public education in our communities. But Lord, our kids deserve a whole lot better than this. We have to do some things differently. That’s a rare leader.

Susan Pendergrass (24:00):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end, because what else can you say? That’s awesome. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to find out soon, and not just Missouri. Many states have the same problems. I would love to have you come back again, Andy. We love having you.

Andy Smarick (24:16):
I love getting emails from you or Zach asking me to come on. I’m happy to give my bad opinions on anything.

Susan Pendergrass (24:23):
No, you have such a good, crystallized view of these things, and your experience on state boards is invaluable. I do appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy and hopefully you’ll come back soon.

Andy Smarick (24:40):
Whenever you call. Have a great summer.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Case for an Education Outsider in Missouri with Andy Smarick appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s cut through all of that. America has been on a teacher (and other school staff) hiring bonanza for decades. Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University has shown that while the total student population in American public schools grew by 100% from 1950 to 2009, the number of teachers grew by 243 percent and administrators and other staff grew by a whopping 709 percent. If that’s not enough, Mike Antonucci wrote earlier this week that since 2008, the American student population has remained essentially stagnant while the number of teachers has grown by 12.4%. He quotes noted researcher Richard Ingersoll stating that the “ballooning” teacher workforce is financial “ticking time bomb.”

Is struggling to keep up rates of teacher growth far outpacing student growth really the same as a “shortage?” I don’t think so.

Since at least the 1950s, America has prioritized reducing class sizes. Pursuing that policy has had consequences. It has meant hiring a lot more teachers, and, generally, paying them less. In other words, the public school system requires more and more teachers each year and has less to offer them. We shouldn’t be surprised when public schools struggle to fill teaching positions. Focusing less on class size reduction and more on hiring the best possible teachers that we can (and paying them accordingly) could help.

How we pay teachers matters as well. It similarly should not surprise us that we see schools struggling to find math and science teachers. Because we pay all teachers equally though step-and-lane pay scales, those who can make more money outside of schools (like those with backgrounds in math and science) are forced to take a financial hit when they decide to become a teacher. Allowing for pay variations that take into account the labor market demands for different skill sets is one way we might attract more math and science teachers.

Herbert Stein’s law states that trends that can’t continue, won’t. Continuing to expand the teaching workforce and compensating them through pay schemes out of the 1920s is not going to get us the teaching workforce our children need. Call it whatever you want, but it isn’t good for kids.

The post Is There Really a Teacher Shortage? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best…. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.”

Was it:

(A)   Then Kansas Senator (now Governor) Sam Brownback

(B)   Then Texas Governor Rick Perry

(C)   Then California Attorney General  (now Governor ) Jerry Brown

(D)   Missouri Governor Jay Nixon

If you guessed Sam Brownback, you would be wrong. It was actually Democrat Jerry Brown.  Yes, that Jerry Brown.

This quote resurfaced in an interesting piece by Matt Barnum of education website The 74 about California’s long-running opposition to federal education policy. Brown’s riposte was a harbinger of the showdown that California ultimately had with the Department of Education in 2013, when California suspended its standardized testing and school rating system. The feds said they couldn’t do it and threatened to withhold funding. Brown responded more like a Texan than a Californian and dared them to come and take it.  The feds backed down.

I think there are two interesting lessons to take away from this story (which is worth reading in full).

First, states can stand up to the federal government. It obviously helped California that it is the most populous state in the union and is one that will reliably deliver Democratic votes, but even with that said, it is clear that the federal government is loathe to pull funding that overwhelmingly benefits poor students and students with special needs. That is not to say that they wouldn’t, but states are probably in a stronger bargaining position than they realize.

Second, the issue itself matters. California picked a smart issue on which to go toe to toe with the Department of Education. Had the feds been opposing standardized tests and the states supporting them, the calculus would probably be much different. A hardline stance might not work with an issue with more divided opinion or one where the federal government has the majority opinion on its side.

I don’t know if what California is doing is right or wrong. I’m by no means a technocrat, but I think they probably swung too far in the opposite direction on testing and school accountability. That said, part of respecting local control of education is realizing that not everyone is going to make the decisions that you would have made had you been part of the process. Agree or not, we can learn from California about what states can do when they feel they have been pushed too far, and we can recognize the need for states to have a game plan in place in case they are asked (or ordered) to do things expressly against the will of their citizens.

The post They Fought the Feds, and the Feds Lost! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In my remarks today, I hope to convince you of three things. First, the idea of the Common Core was noble, but misguided. Second, the Common Core State Standards will not significantly improve student achievement. And finally, the federal government created the controversy we have seen surrounding the Common Core over the past few years.

A Noble but Misguided Goal

The idea behind the Common Core is quite simple. Schools need standards because standards allow teachers to align the curriculum and allow teachers to see what they are to cover in each grade. I have been told many times that prior to schools adopting learning standards, it was not uncommon for students in the same grade in the same school to have radically different experiences depending on the teachers they had. Standards help alleviate that problem.

Following the infamous “A Nation at Risk Report” report of 1983, the standards movement was launched. This Reagan-administration report used alarming language to describe the nation’s education system. The authors of the report wrote:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

The report fueled a desire to improve the quality of our education system. State officials wanted to keep a watchful eye on how schools were performing. To do that they needed tests, and to have tests, they needed standards on which to base them.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, states began creating their own standards-based accountability systems. By 2000, 39 states had accountability systems in place. After the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001, the remaining states were forced to follow suit. As a result, by the mid-2000s we had 50 different state standards and 50 different accountability systems.

These individual state standards created a problem. Students from families that moved from one state to another could miss entire topics if they were covered in one grade in one state and in a different grade in another. And, very importantly, the different tests did not allow us to compare one state to another because the accountability systems were different. In a state with very low standards a student might score “proficient,” but if he were in a state with very high standards he might score “basic.”

In reality, these were not problems created by having 50 state standards. They were problems that have always existed, and in many regards still exist. To be honest, these problems are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. I mean, would you go through all of the effort that the Common Core designers went through just to improve transparency across states? I wouldn’t, especially when we have the National Assessment of Educational progress, known as the nation’s report card, which already allows us to compare one state to another. The most valid reason to support the Common Core comes from the thought that these standards could improve student achievement for all students. This is where the supporters for Common Core were misguided. This is where the logic for Common Core falters, and this is what brings me to my second point: that Common Core will not improve educational outcomes for students.

Common Core Will Not Improve Educational Outcomes

Let me ask: How might a system of new standards improve educational outcomes for all students? As far as I can tell, there are three options:

• The standards could better align the curriculum.
• The standards could be more rigorous.
• Or, the standards could create a broader platform for collaboration.

Let’s examine each of these.

The standards could better align the curriculum

Remember, states have already developed standards and aligned curricula. We’d have to believe that the Common Core has somehow come up with a better way to do these things—that they have discovered the special sauce or that the designers have figured out the right progression of learning. Something tells me that is not the case. While the quality of education research is improving, there is simply not enough evidence to know if we should teach fractions in third grade or fourth, or whether we should introduce money in kindergarten or first grade. I recently sat on a committee to rewrite Missouri’s state standards. I can tell you, while the process is informed by research, it often comes down to educated guessing. The individuals making these guesses are indeed educated, but in the end, many of these decisions are completely subjective.

So what is the second option?

The standards could be simply be more rigorous

They could raise the level of expectations for students. After all, students rise to the level of expectation, don’t they? If this were true, we would expect students in states that previously had rigorous standards to perform better than students in states with weaker standards. In a study for the Brookings Institution, Tom Loveless examined this very issue. He found no relationship between the rigor of state standards and student performance on the NAEP. None. Another thing to consider is that ratings of the Common Core Standards by the Fordham Foundation, a group that has been very supportive of the effort, do not place Common Core at the top of the standards list. They are among the best according to Fordham, but in Math and Language arts, other standards were rated higher. If we believe that rigor or the quality of standards matter, then it puzzles me why supporters of national standards would be so willing to go to bat for Common Core. Why not simply adopt the superior Massachusetts standards?

The Common Core will not improve student achievement by better aligning curriculum, nor can we improve student learning simply by being more rigorous. What’s left?

A system of national standards could create a broader platform for collaboration

Before Common Core, textbook companies often designed curricula for more populous states like California and Texas. As a result, states found it difficult to get textbooks that aligned with their individual standards. Common Core helps alleviate this problem. Moreover, it allows teachers throughout the country to collaborate on lessons related to the standards. While this sounds great, planning on a substantial benefit from collaboration is misguided. If it were true that more opportunities for collaboration led to success, then we would expect to see more populous states—those that drive textbook production—to have an advantage. Not only would they have textbooks tailored to their curricula, but with a larger number of teachers, they would have greater opportunities for collaboration. Yet, we don’t see a California or Texas advantage.

In the face of the evidence, there is simply no logical model that can explain how a set of standards that simply tells teachers what to teach will improve student learning. At least not today.

To be clear: Standards are important, and evidence does show that the standards-based accountability movement has led to modest learning gains for students. It seems, however, that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Schools have already aligned curricula, and we have already begun focusing on student outcomes. New standards may have some impact on the margins, but by themselves they cannot substantially improve student achievement.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive indictment of Common Core. I don’t believe Common Core will ruin our education system. I don’t believe it is some grand conspiracy to dumb down America. I simply believe it is bad policy.

But if Common Core is innocuous, then why are we devoting so much time to it? We are having this conversation today because promoters of Common Core oversold, and because the federal government overstepped. As is often the case, the actions of the federal government came with unintended consequences.

The Federal Government Created the Common Core Controversy

Common Core did not begin as a federal initiative. I hesitate to call this a “state-led” initiative, and it certainly wasn’t a grass roots initiative. It was instigated by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. These two trade organizations began the process late in George W. Bush’s administration, but the idea of national standards goes back even further, to his father’s administration. Early on in the development of the Common Core standards, some thought that the standards would be adopted by a handful of states; it was hoped that other states would adopt them voluntarily over time. That changed with federal involvement.

In 2009, President Obama launched his Race to the Top initiative, a competitive grant program that was part of the stimulus plan. States could compete for $4.35 billion dollars in prize money by proposing a series of reforms. This came at a time when states were feeling the pressure of the recession and could ill afford to pass up an opportunity for additional federal funding. One of the reforms supported in Race to the Top was the adoption of learning standards that were common to a majority of states—what would become Common Core.

As part of the first round of the Race to the Top process, states had to submit their applications (including a commitment to the Common Core standards) by January 19, 2010. The second round was June 1. But the final draft of the standards was not even released until June of 2010. In other words, the federal government encouraged states to commit to common standards before those standards were even finalized. Still, states jumped at the opportunity. By 2013, 45 states had adopted the standards. President Obama took credit for this in his State of the Union address.

At the same time, the Obama administration doubled down on support of Common Core by offering to waive certain No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements to states that adopted Common Core. Schools and states were finding it increasingly difficult to comply with various aspects of NCLB; that is, they had failed to meet the mandated 100 percent proficiency marks. States could avoid penalties by promoting education reform policies championed by the administration, one of which was common standards.

Whether you support federal involvement or not, it is difficult to deny that the actions of the U.S. Department of Education caused or at least contributed to the controversy surrounding Common Core. What might have been a coalition of states that grew and developed over time was catapulted into the national stage as a new and radical reform that many states adopted, if not against their will, then at least under duress.

Conclusion

While the motivation behind the Common Core standards was good, the outcomes—at least in terms of liberty—are not. Common Core moves control of one of the most important aspects of education—what students learn—further from students and parents, and it concentrates power at the federal level. As Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman once said, “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” The Common Core standards reduce individual liberty and academic freedom for states, teachers, and students. They nullify the great advantage of individual states—the ability to act as laboratories that allow us to evaluate different systems to see what works best—in favor of a monolithic approach that stifles innovation. Ultimately, the Common Core movement is an expression of the flawed mindset that we can mandate and orchestrate improved student achievement through centralized control. 

The post A Well Intentioned Disaster: A Presentation on the Merits of Common Core State Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Milton Friedman first discussed the idea of educational vouchers in the 1950s, arguing that competition between schools would improve efficiency and drive down costs. The idea became popularized during the 1980 television series Free to Choose.

In voiced-over footage of high school-age children walking through metal detectors before entering an urban school, Friedman said:

Isn’t that awful? What a way for kids to have to go to school through metal detectors and to be searched. What can they conceivably learn under such circumstances? Nobody is happy with this kind of education. The taxpayers surely aren’t. This isn’t cheap education. . . . And what about the broken windows and the torn school books and the smashed school equipment? The teachers who teach here don’t like this situation. The students don’t like to come here to go to school. And most of all the parents. They are the ones with the worst deal. They pay taxes like the rest of us. They are just as concerned about the kind of education their kids get as the rest of us are. They know their kids are getting a bad education, but they feel trapped. Most of them see no alternative but to continue sending their kids to schools like this.

So while lawmakers have looked to improve education through top down policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, Milton Friedman was the first to acknowledge that parents should be in the driver’s seat of their child’s education.

Today, a majority of Americans support educational choice. The Friedman Foundation recently released the 2015 Schooling in America Survey, which found that 63 percent of school parents support educational vouchers. When asked to rank the actions a state government should take in intervening in low-performing schools, 41 percent ranked supply vouchers/scholarships as number one. Twenty-six percent ranked convert the failing schools to charter schools as the number two solution. Clearly, Americans favor options. Still, many do not know about the man behind the idea.  

This is why the Show-Me Institute is celebrating Friedman Legacy Day on July 31 (register now). Oklahoma State Senator Jabar Shumate will discuss the effects of school choice on urban issues. Unlike Missouri’s legislature, Oklahoma’s policymakers have helped establish two private educational choice programs—a voucher program for students with disabilities and a tax-credit scholarship for low-income students.

Please register for this event now.

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For universal Pre-K supporters, this was a major loss, but for Missouri taxpayers, our “failure” to get the grant is actually a win. Federal grants have a history of costing states more over time—Race to the Top is a recent education-related example.

Missouri already has doubled its expenditures toward expanding early childhood education. The Department of Economic Development (DED) made $10 million available to promote the expansion of public Pre-K programs just last year.

Preschool education is where Missourians already have the most school choice. Expanding public options will only duplicate existing services, likely shifting some students from the private to the public sector, where there is no guarantee the services will be better.

Nationally, 74 percent of four-year-olds already are enrolled in Pre-K or home-based programs. Using listings from Great Schools, the table below highlights the number of private Pre-K options versus public ones in several of Missouri’s cities.

Research on the benefits of early childhood education has yielded mixed results. Even those studies showing significant benefits of preschool expansion touted by Gov. Jay Nixon as “proven” are subject to criticism. One comprehensive study on the effects of Head Start showed there was no long-term increase in cognitive abilities of children who participated in the early education program. Yet, Nixon gave the organization $7 million just last year.

Missouri taxpayers should not pay for services that already exist, especially if the research backing those services is shaky. There are better solutions to addressing the educational needs of children in poverty, ones that don’t include government mandates.

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Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted a series of welfare programs called the War on Poverty. One of these programs was Head Start, a program aimed at preparing low-income children for kindergarten.

Also under the umbrella of the War on Poverty, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was enacted in 1965. The purpose of ESEA was to start funding schools with federal money, but it forbade a national curriculum.

Under President Jimmy Carter’s administration, the Department of Education was founded in 1979. Just a few years later, in 1983, the American public was shocked by the findings of A Nation at Risk, a report issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education during President Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

President George H. W. Bush and President Bill Clinton left their mark on standards-based education in the 1990s with America 2000 (Bush) and Goals 2000 (Clinton).

In 2001, President George W. Bush reauthorized the ESEA under a new name, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and in 2011, the U.S. Department of Education began awarding states with flexibility waivers from NCLB if they did things like adopt Common Core or evaluate teachers based on student achievement.

In just 50 years, federal oversight in education has grown and evolved. On the anniversary of one of LBJ’s key initiatives, some are calling for even more government intervention to fix the inequalities that still plague the United States today.

But federal intervention will not solve Missouri’s education problems—just look at the results. Few would argue the education system in America is in good shape, or that every child is receiving a quality education. So why institute more government intervention?

If the past 50 years has taught us anything, it’s that Missouri needs to enter a new era of education reform, one in which choice and competition are embraced.

The post Education: A Brief History Of Federal Overreach appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

My students then received a lesson about the 10th amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Because education is not explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, education is a power that belongs to the states.

Tell that to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

The U.S. Department of Education unveiled its 50-state strategy on Monday. The strategy, a neglected measure of the 12-year-old No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), readdresses the uneven distribution of effective teachers across low- and high-poverty schools. It requires states to create new plans that address teacher distribution by April 2015, and Missouri is not immune.

For fewer than half the states that submitted plans post-NCLB, many have not been updated in several years. Below is a table from Missouri’s original analysis identifying core academic subjects (math, science, etc.) taught by highly qualified teachers. The data, though last revised in 2006, shows a lower percentage of highly qualified teachers in high-poverty schools.

Missouri is one of 42 states to receive a waiver from parts of NCLB, including the infamous accountability decree, “All students will be proficient by 2014.” In May, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) submitted a request for a one-year extension to the 2012 waiver. DESE will have to renew again next May.

Not coincidentally, the Department of Education’s requirement for updated teacher equity plans will have to be submitted one month prior to DESE’s 2015 extension request. The Department of Education gets equity plans, Missouri gets NCLB waiver. The Department of Education gets unified curriculum, states get Race to the Top money. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” seems to be the Department of Education’s M.O.

Of course, teacher equity is an issue that ought to be addressed, but the U.S. Constitution did not grant federal authority over education. This power belongs to Missourians. This whole incentive game the Department of Education is playing isn’t fooling anyone. Teacher equity may be a problem, but federal overreach is a bigger one.

The post I’ll Scratch Your Back, If You Comply With This Federal Mandate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s start with Finn and Petrilli’s argument that [Missourians] should embrace Common Core in part because the state “has already invested time and money to implement the new standards.” Basically, Washington successfully coerced [Missouri] into sinking money into Common Core, so we had better stick with it.

McCluskey and Banfield note that the Fordham piece mischaracterized the nature of Common Core’s development.

Common Core was created by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, associations that neither represent states nor the people of [Missouri]. Legislators represent you, and the NGA doesn’t speak for states just because governors are elected. NGA decisions have no binding ramifications for states, and it’s doubtful anyone has ever voted for a gubernatorial candidate based on what they thought he or she would do in the NGA. Governors simply have very little incentive to care what the NGA does.

Next, the Obama administration didn’t just “promote” the standards, it coerced their adoption with real ramifications. At the nadir of the “Great Recession,” it told states that to fully compete in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program they had to promise to adopt Common Core. That is exactly what most did, before the final standards were even published. Adoption was cemented by making it one of only two ways states could meet requirements for waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act.

Finn and Petrilli claim that the Common Core doesn’t dictate curriculum and is good for school choice.

That’s like saying that government requiring you to ride a bike, but letting you pick the color and a banana seat, doesn’t constrain your transportation options. Similarly, they suggested that because lots of people are scrambling to produce Core-aligned materials, it’s fostering innovation. That’s basically proclaiming that with all car and airplane manufacturers suddenly making bikes, travel innovation will explode.

Readers shouldn’t be fooled by the folks at Fordham; the Common Core is definitely not a “victory for everyone,” as they would have you believe.

(Hat tip to John Combest for pointing out all the places the Fordham piece was published.)

The post Is Common Core A ‘Victory For Everyone’? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the United States Department of Education (U.S. DoE) created a competitive grant process called Race to the Top. The Race to the Top application encouraged states to adopt college- and career-ready standards.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) applied for a Race to the Top grant in January of 2010, promising to adopt college- and career-ready standards.

In 2012, the U.S. DoE began awarding waivers to No Child Left Behind. DESE applied for a waiver in February of 2012, again promising to adopt college- and career-ready standards. They received the waiver in June of 2012.

DESE, without approval from the legislature, set Missouri on a new course by adopting the Common Core State Standards. Essentially, DESE committed Missourians to a set of national curriculum standards.

The Common Core State Standards have been met with a considerable amount of consternation.  Bills have been introduced in the Missouri House and Senate that would halt the implementation of the new standards. I have submitted written testimony to the committees and written elsewhere about the impact of these standards.

Now we are finding out that individual districts in states that did not receive waivers from the U.S. DoE are able to apply for waivers. What I want to know is, when will DESE begin awarding waivers to school districts that wish to opt out of Common Core? After all, the state was able to opt out of a federally binding law and now individual school districts may have that ability. Shouldn’t DESE give local schools the ability to opt out of these new state standards if they can demonstrate that they have a comprehensive local system of accountability in place?

The post DESE Should Consider District Level Waivers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The statement that the civil rights and other activist groups produced at the end of July suggested as a solution more of the status quo — or, at least, more for the status quo. It seems that their position is to give current schools more money (with no qualifier) and trust them to fix the problems.

Unfortunately, the economic reality is that money doesn’t grow on trees. Whether or not this attempt at ensuring that the dollars devoted to education are spent effectively actually achieves all the program’s goals, competition for the grants will hopefully create change in a stagnant system.

One of the criteria in this system that the civil rights groups oppose is the use of charter schools. Today, an article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that minority support for these institutions is on the rise, and the numbers suggest that nearly 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics support the formation of charter schools, while only 14 percent of African Americans and 21 percent of Hispanics oppose them. It is time for these groups to stop playing politics in education. The current system doesn’t work.

The Show-Me Institute’s most recent policy study shows that superintendents in school districts across the state are receiving compensation based not on performance factors, but rather correlated with school district characteristics, such as population size.

The time to reform education is now; competition and a fundamental change in how schools are funded have a far better chance of helping the kids that need it most. Although Missouri is not on the short list to receive any of the grants, we should pay close attention to this new federal market-based funding structure and track its results.

The post Education’s Race to the Top appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While adopting the standards would be voluntary, the Obama administration has said that it intends to withhold millions of dollars in grants for low-income students in states that refuse to join the effort — regardless of the quality of their existing standards.

The administration also says states that embrace the standards will have a better chance of receiving potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in its “Race to the Top’’ competition, which rewards education innovation.

Missouri’s standards are generally not considered to be at the level of Massachusetts’, so Missouri could probably improve its standards somewhat by agreeing to the Common Core Standards. But why should Missouri — or any state — adopt the Common Core Standards when it could do better by emulating Massachusetts or California?

The post The Standards Dilemma appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

JEFFERSON CITY — On Wednesday, the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) presented its application for nearly $750 million in federal funding to the state Senate Committee on Education. The program, “Race to the Top,” is a federal competitive grant program that will distribute $4.35 billion to states for the purpose of education reform.

Of the $743 million the state has requested, $355 million will go directly to public school districts, Chris Nicastro, DESE Commissioner of Education, said. The bulk of the remainder, about $272 million, is set to pay for providing broadband Internet access to all of the state’s public school districts.

The 299-page application can be read online here.

The grant program is intended to encourage states to adopt standards and assessments that allow students to succeed, to build data systems that track student performance, to recruit and retain the most effective teachers, and to create programs that will help “turn around” lowest-achieving schools.

Interestingly, Nicastro said that the reforms outlined in DESE’s grant application would be put in place regardless of the amount of money awarded to the state.

“We do intend, with or without this grant, to use the work we’ve put in and the application as a framework for redesigning the department itself and for driving educational reform in Missouri over the next decade,” Nicastro said.

She continued, "we do believe the plan will serve as the catalyst to propel Missouri’s public education system into the Top 10, nationally and internationally, and that is our goal.”

Some of the following reforms have been outlined in the application:

• Adopting and implementing cross-state standards for curriculum and testing;
• giving MOBroadbandNow broadband Internet access to all school districts;
• developing web-based teacher quality databases to effectively monitor successful teaching practices;
• evaluating teacher performance based on student performance;
• developing assessment methods at the state level;
• creating teams to intervene quickly in failing schools;
• and, allowing the state education board to close failing charter schools.

During a brief question-and–answer period, senators mostly asked questions about how the proposed reforms would affect charter schools.

Sen. Scott Rupp (R-Wentzville), said he was concerned that DESE’s application didn’t remove the geographic limitations placed on charter schools, which can currently operate only in Kansas City and Saint Louis.

Others asked about how charter schools would report student academic performance.

“We’ve not been as we transparent about reporting the performance of charter schools as we should be,” Nicastro said. She added, however, that “Race to the Top” would make more information available, and would help make charter schools more accountable.

Nicastro was referring in part to legislative proposals that tweak charter school statutes, which DESE recently submitted to Missouri's General Assembly.

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When a state plans to spend a large portion of Race to the Top grant money outside of schools, that’s a sign that the Department of Education is offering too much money.

The post Race to the Internet appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The editorial concludes:

The unseemly competition for federal dollars will continue until state and local governments join forces on the principled high ground and refuse to play anymore.

Race to the Top is similar to this year’s Census marketing campaign. The end goal of each is for the federal government to distribute money to the states. The difference is that the Constitution mandates a census, whereas there’s no constitutional justification for a race to the top — or for any other federal interference in education.

If Race to the Top is a show, I’d like Missouri to call a friend; we should call Texas and learn from a state that won’t run for the tax dollars.

The post Dancing with the Feds appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Even if we won the full amount, it would only run our schools for two days, so for that we weren’t going to cede control over our curriculum standards,” Mr. Scott said.

One-time cash awards won’t be very helpful to Race to the Top winners in the long term, as Texas officials can foresee. Nor will the process give reforms a chance to sprint ahead. Race to the Top asks states to make changes on paper that might not affect what goes on in schools at all. For example, to be competitive, states have to remove legislative caps on the number of charter schools that can operate. But they don’t have to approve any new charters. So, states could lift their charter caps, win cash and praise from Arne Duncan, and then turn down all charter proposals for spurious reasons. The states would have more money, but students wouldn’t have any more choices than what they started with.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of Race to the Top demands including abolishing caps on charters. As we’ve seen in Oregon, legislative caps are not always the main barrier to opening a charter. Oregon requires charter proposals to be submitted to school boards. These boards govern the same districts that the proposed charters would compete with, were they approved. Understandably reluctant to admit competitors to their districts, the boards deny charters on weak grounds or force them to resubmit proposals with minute improvements.

The Department of Education can’t correct this problem with a blanket directive to all states. It would have to examine each state’s charter approval process and identify which policies are holding back charter expansion. And it’s the same for other Race to the Top priorities: In some states, laws separating teacher data from student data may rule out merit pay, while for other states, merit pay may be illegal or difficult to implement for unrelated reasons. And so on.

Thus far, Missouri hasn’t shown Texas’ discretion — the state plans to apply for a Race to the Top grant. I hope Race to the Top won’t distract the state from meaningful reforms. Missouri officials should bear in mind that the ultimate goal is to make substantive policy improvements, not to win an award.

The post Texas Keeps Out of the Race appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When the Springfield News-Leader expressed interest in running the op-ed, they asked me to trim it down by 50 words so that it would fit their publishing parameters. As I hope readers will see, an op-ed’s final form rarely allows the author to offer a comprehensive picture of all the information they would convey if space were no constraint. Perhaps as a result of this necessary brevity, some of the News-Leader‘s readers have posted a few skeptical comments about my op-ed, so I’d like to take this opportunity to respond to the points they raise.

The first issue I’d like to address is that of my motives for writing on this topic. The commenter writing under the name “Ray Smith” suggested that I am part of a general effort to “undermine public education,” and that I have simply seized upon President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative (which, in part, promotes the expansion of charter schools) as an opportunity to promote my own agenda.

I do have one comprehensive, all-encompassing agenda when it comes to the subject of education, and I don’t care who knows it. I want to make sure that all parents have the greatest possible range of options when it comes to deciding where their children will be educated. While I, myself, am a proud product of an excellent public school system, it does not matter to me in the slightest if parents prefer traditional public schools, charter schools, parochial schools, or secular private schools. All that concerns me is that children get the best available educations — and I firmly believe that the greatest likelihood of achieving that goal is to fashion education policy in such a way that parents can vote with their feet if they decide a school is not meeting their child’s needs.

As should be clear, many parents do not believe that their local traditional public schools are the best educational option for their children — and, with that being the case, it makes the most sense to help those parents find alternatives that will serve their families better. I suggested in my op-ed that, to the extent that charter schools expand the range of options available to parents, they serve as a step toward this goal. Thus, expanding charter school availability represents good policy. In my mind, it is merely a bonus that the best academic research is showing that most (though far from all) charter schools are performing as well as or better than their traditional public school counterparts when it comes to certain measures of academic achievement.

Which brings us to Mr. Smith’s suggestion that I believe charter schools to be a “magic bullet” that will solve the education problems rampant in our state — and his intimation that I was ignoring evidence that I did not like. To the contrary, when writing the op-ed, I wanted to make sure that I pointed out the evidence in our own study that calls into question whether charter schools always generate better results than traditional public schools. Mr. Smith correctly points out that the Stanford study shows that a significant number of the nation’s charter schools appear to be attracting students, even though the schools do not currently appear to measure up to their traditional school counterparts in regard to academic achievement as measured by standardized tests. The reason I addressed the Stanford study in the op-ed was because the authors of the recently released Show-Me Institute study did not have access to research that isolated Missouri’s charter schools, and I believed that it would be valuable to highlight the fact that, in spite of the Stanford study’s broader findings, the data do suggest that Missouri’s charter schools are performing better than most.

Here at Show-Me Daily, I can address the Stanford study’s findings a little more broadly. For charter opponents, of course, the suggestion that some charter schools are not improving their students’ academic achievement is a clear signal that these schools need to close. Maybe … but maybe not. I have previously stated on this very blog that I do not generally oppose the closure of especially bad charter schools. But the facts also bear out that official action is not necessarily needed to close these schools, because in cases where the situation is truly bad, parents will voluntarily move their children to a different school and that bad school will fail for lack of funding (much as any other business would).

Also,as I note in the op-ed, parents consider a wide array of factors when deciding where to send their children to be educated — and, for many parents, academic achievement may not be the most important factor. So, if a charter school lags a little bit behind its traditional charter school counterparts in academic performance, but dozens of parents still want to send their children there, maybe government officials shouldn’t force its closure. After all, we don’t allow government officials to tell wealthy parents what factors they can consider in choosing a school for their children, so why should we assume that government officials are within their rights to tell lower-income parents what factors they can consider?

And, finally, I will add that I would actually prefer that Missouri not seek “Race to the Top” funding. In my opinion, the Tenth Amendment should preclude the federal government from interfering with educational matters, because they have always been reserved to the states. While I do think it would be good policy to expand the availability of charter schools in our state, if Missouri’s legislators are not persuaded that a particular policy is the best idea for our families, they certainly shouldn’t adopt it simply because the federal government is dangling money out there as an incentive.

The post In Which the Author’s Secret Agenda Is Made Plain appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Indeed, the practice of finding and highlighting innovative solutions that exist somewhere outside Washington seems to be at the core of Duncan’s approach. It’s the rationale for the $5 billion “Race to the Top” stimulus money, which he hopes to use to reward schools that are centers of successful innovation.

The “Race to the Top” would reward innovation if it gave schools money for implementing programs that the schools came up with on their own. Administrators would think, “We need to create something innovative to get the money.” They would experiment, and the best ideas would earn “Race to the Top” dollars.

That’s not how the “Race to the Top” actually works. Duncan has decided in advance which practices he prefers, and he intends to use the “Race to the Top” money to induce schools to conform.

An extended school year is one such favored policy:

“Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

National standards are another:

“We need national standards, and assessments to measure them,” Duncan said. “The idea of having 50 states designing their own standards is crazy.”

Duncan is right when he says the best ideas often don’t come from Washington. Unfortunately, schools sometimes ignore good ideas when Washington pays them to follow the crowd.

The post Ideas Don’t Come From Washington, But Money Does appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Charter schools and lab schools would have a framework within which to experiment.

This is put forward as an argument in favor of uniform education standards across states — that a national standard will help charter schools experiment better!

I can’t imagine how any government standards would do that. But even if I’m wrong, and standards are an important ingredient in innovation, charters already have the state standards to work from. Currently, charters can choose from 50 different standards and pick whichever ones would help them innovate best.

(How does that work? They look at the traditional district standards and say, “This is what we need to not follow if we want to experiment?”)

Besides a benevolent desire to help charters experiment, which assistance no charter I know of has requested, standards enthusiasts are motivated by cold, hard cash. I call it “Race to the Tax Dollars;” Arne Duncan calls it “Race to the Top.” A Post-Dispatch editorial describes the matter with customary candor:

More than $4 billion in federal stimulus funds are being devoted to a national “Race to the Top Fund” to support innovation and leadership in the nation’s public K-12 schools. Some $350 million of that will go to states that have signed onto the new standards.

Notice that bribing all states to do the same thing is called “innovation.” I think this is the kind of innovation standards supporters have in mind for charter schools.

The post A Nonexistent Benefit of Uniform Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I’m glad Missouri hasn’t signed on. Beware of states bearing standards. No state by itself has particularly good standards, so the chances are slim that all of them together will come up with something better. And bad standards could serve to solidify the near-monopolistic state of the education market. After standards are adopted, textbook companies that go along with them are rewarded and competing curricula are crowded out.

I fear my rejoicing may be short-lived, though, because when Arne Duncan includes the standards in his “Race to the Tax Dollars” — I mean, “Race to the Top” — scheme, Missouri will have little choice but to go along.

There is one reason for optimism: Standards on paper don’t necessarily affect what happens in a classroom. Within a single state, some districts teach beyond the standards, and others lag far behind. That pattern will continue to hold if standards are adopted at the national level.

For more on national standards, and to learn why they’re like unicorns, see Neal McCluskey’s post at Cato@Liberty.

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