by guestblogger Andy Smarick

Eleven years ago I was a legislative assistant to a US Congressman, and K-12 was in my portfolio.  NCLB was making its way through the House, and the congressman was leaning against.  I took it upon myself to change his mind.

I gave him our state testing data showing enormous achievement gaps.  This legislation, I argued, was social justice for disadvantaged kids.  Standards, assessments, accountability, and transparency were not only reasonable but also necessary.  We had to do something about failing schools.  You have to vote for this legislation!

Ten years later I was Deputy Education Commissioner of New Jersey, and I was leading our effort to write a waiver to free our state from NCLB.

Were I interested in reputational self-protection, I’d take the easy way out and simply say that America learned a great deal over that decade; that I was right as a zealous 26-year old to agitate, and I was right as a wiser, more prudent 36-year old to retrench.

But that’s not how I feel.  To this day, I’m deeply conflicted about the proper role of the federal government in our schools.  As I alluded to yesterday, as a blogger, but more importantly, as a guy who’s done a good bit of education policy making and writing, I ought to have an answer.  And I don’t.

NCLB did much more good than most people today are willing to admit.  It advanced standards, assessments, accountability, and choice, and it elevated expectations and demanded results for our most underserved kids.

But its flaws are also manifest—the use of attainment instead of growth, HQT, the lack of nuance in labeling schools, the timid interventions for failure.

Add to this list the creed of my colleagues on the political right—one to which I am instinctively partial—that NCLB was a federal overreach.  My conservative philosophy tells me that the feds should be light-touch with schools.  States should have power, and DC-emanating, uniform dictates (whether in education or elsewhere) are typically a recipe for grand folly.

But somehow we seem to have forgotten that America actually has experience with a K-12 system of ascendant states and an enervated Uncle Sam.  It’s called the pre-NCLB era…one where urban districts performed appallingly for decades, where suburban achievement gaps gaped, where choices for the disadvantaged were rare, where accountability was diluted.

But such meddlesome facts are now lost in the haze of history and histrionics.  Today, it is easier to vehemently charge NCLB with being a domestic policy party crasher instead of what it actually was: an eagerly invited guest.  And so we have what Michael Gerson derisively refers to as the “waiver revolution,” in which I—apparently as some sort of New Jersey Jacobin—participated, colluding in “the broad institutionalization of lowered expectations.”

The Obama Administration’s ESEA waivers were designed to ameliorate NCLB’s deficiencies.  They put states back in the driver’s seat with labels, interventions, and more.  The waivers also concede that Uncle Sam can only do so much in K-12.  And the application’s designation of three small categories of schools (priority, focus, and reward) indicate that SEAs are limited as well, meaning local districts are really in charge.  This all certainly pleases many of NCLB’s most strident critics.

I believe firmly that my colleagues and I in New Jersey—and likeminded friends in some other states—approached the waivers the right way.  We were committed to high expectations, achievement, accountability, and flexibility.  Our application reflects that.

But my experience over the last decade, particularly my time outside of the beltway, has taught me that for all of the passionate national talk about closing achievement gaps and expanding opportunity, this rhetoric, this set of beliefs, didn’t permeate the field as deeply as many believe.  Cynics and doubters abound.

Seen in this light, the waivers, now given away like candy, open the door to not only outright mischief, but also the type of subtle pre-NCLB languidness that ill-served disadvantaged boys and girls.  To be clear, I think strong governors and bold, reform-minded state chiefs will advance the interests of kids via waiver flexibility.  But those conditions don’t exist everywhere.  But kids do.

So what in the world am I to do?  My conservative philosophy and my studied understanding of public policy generally tell me to trust states and locals and to recoil from a presumptuous, voracious federal government.  So should I celebrate NCLB’s demise and embrace the waiver revolution?

But my ideology has to end at the water’s edge of kids’ futures.  I can’t ignore history’s lesson that lots of vulnerable students suffered grievously, continuously, and with little notice prior to NCLB.  I can’t ignore that some leaders have lower expectations for the disadvantaged, and that some organizations argue that we’ll never solve education until we solve poverty.  And I can’t ignore that when these factors are combined with the dissipation of federal pressure via the waivers, that a probable consequence in some places is decreased urgency about the fortunes of needy kids, especially those in the vast body of “uncategorized” schools.

So I’m torn, unable, despite a decade of thinking, to imagine a reauthorized ESEA that gets the balance right.  Wither my value as a blogger and policy guy.

As much as I’d like this to my own moving cri de coeur, because of the quadrennial, I’m compelled to send it through today’s presidential prism.  And the view is startling.

Should Governor Romney be elected, he will have a daunting K-12 gauntlet to run.  Because of the nation’s huge debt, conservative backlash to federal schools overreach, the growing unease over Common Core, the Obama Administration’s bent for nontrivial reform, and many other complicating variables, a President Romney will have to thread more needles than a seamstress.

How should he address overall spending levels, the proportion of federal education funds dedicated to formula-based programs, the growth of competitive grant programs, Obama initiatives like Race to the Top and i3, federal guidance on teacher evaluations, and much more?

But in the end, all of these are simply proxy wars of the larger ideological K-12 struggle of our time:  What exactly is the right role for the federal government in our schools?

And during his first months in office, a President Romney will face the flashpoint that has me tied in knots:  What in the world do we do with NCLB, and what do we make of these waivers?

As I figure it, if I’m to regain my blogger street cred, and if I’m going to be of any value as a conservative ed policy person, I have 34 days to make good.  For the next few days at least, you can track my struggles and development here, where I’ll, among other things, discuss some of the proposals on the table.

PS: I’ve locked myself in the Eduwonk studios like Sandler, Buscemi, and Fraser in Airheads, so my blog license is secure for the time being.  Stay tuned.

by guestblogger Andy Smarick

What’s crackin’, people.  It’s been too long.  I’m Smarick.  I used to be an inveterate blogger and tweeter.  I disappeared for a couple years, but now I’m back.  Kind of like Bobby Ewing or Kristin Cavallari.

To paraphrase Hitch, Rotherham is gone on a week’s vacation, and he left the keys to Eduwonk.  So I’m just going to take it for a little spin.

Some have noted the eerie similarities between this blog’s expert owner/operator and this mere house-sitter.  We’re both named Andy.  We’re both partners at Bellwether Education.  We both write about education reform.  We both did stints at the White House.  We each have a set of twins.

But should you ever get confused, just remember, I’m the one who has established healthy boundaries with fish.

For the next few days, I’m going to use this prime real estate to discuss some of the massive challenges of ed reform policy-making.  A sage in our movement recently commented that an axiom of policy-making is that government decision-makers tend to trust the levels and branches of government that they have the least experience with.

I’ve found this to be absolutely true in practice.  It’s easy to see the limitations and dysfunctions of the public entity in whose belly you sit, and you naturally assume that others must be high functioning by comparison.  The grass is always greener; they have Adidas and you have Zips.

Local leaders, tangled in municipal politics, want the powerful feds to solve their problems.  Legislative staffers, fully aware of the unappetizing sausage making of the legislative process, just want the executive branch to make things work.  And so on.

But here’s the thick of the plot.  I can no longer bring myself to take part in this ostensibly sensible buck-passing.  I’ve worked on education policy for a state legislature, a governor, a US Congressman, the US Department of Education, the White House, and most recently, as the Deputy Commissioner of a state department of education.

I’m painfully aware of the warts on all of these institutions.  In their own unique ways, each has a closet full of plaid shirts with butterfly collars and double-knit reversible slacks.

So with that as foreshadowing, I’ll ask you to stay tuned for my next post, one which is likely to lead to the revocation of my license to blog and the termination of my policymaking career.

As you know, the job description of a blogger requires a preternatural aversion to self-doubt.  And senior-level policy makers are hired because they are convinced—and they are able to convince others—that no matter what the issue is or the extent of its complications, they have the answer.

Well, I’m going to admit great uncertainty and explain why I’m conflicted about one of today’s most important education policy issues.

And until I get an armed escort out of Eduwonk headquarters, that’s going to be the dominant motif of my contributions this week:  Getting education policy right in law and regulation is extraordinarily difficult, and successfully implementing those policies is even harder.

Gotta go…I see a guard coming.

by guestblogger Chad Aldeman

AEI recently released a paper by my Bellwether colleagues Sara Mead, Andrew Rotherham, and Rachael Brown looking at the possible implications for a teacher evaluation “hangover.” As nearly half the states have adopted new comprehensive teacher evaluation rules over the last few years, the paper asks what happens on the morning after. It’s a smart, clever, well-written piece, and it’s well worth your time to consider the trade-offs of state legislators mandating all elements of teacher evaluation policies in the midst of a changing education landscape.

And yet, there aren’t many states actually implementing comprehensive teacher evaluations yet. All they’ve done is adopted some policies, many of which don’t take effect for several years. For example, for all the talk about the new teacher evaluation requirements in Illinois, they don’t actually kick in statewide until the 2016-17 school year. That’s four years from now. For the 33 states and the District of Columbia that have earned flexibility from No Child Left Behind in exchange for, among other things, adopting new teacher and principal evaluation systems, those don’t have to be in place until 2014-15. That’s still two years away.

To extend the metaphor, it’s like we’re worrying about the hangover from New Year’s Eve 2014. There’s a lot of time, and a lot of stuff that needs to happen, between now and then.

The other meme that’s beginning to emerge, in The Hangover but also in Craig Jerald’s Movin’ It and Improvin’ It!  and Rachel Curtis and Ross Wiener’s Aspen Institute guide to developing teacher evaluation systems, is that these new evaluation systems should be used for more than firing bad teachers. That’s true! But, again, it’s just not really an issue yet.

Without evaluation systems actually in place, there aren’t that many schools or districts making consequential decisions based on a teacher’s performance. Going back to Illinois, the new Chicago teacher’s contract explicitly built in a “no stakes” year that effectively bars any consequences for teachers until at least 2014. Tennessee became the first state to implement a comprehensive statewide evaluation system last year, but for all of the hand-wringing about its evaluation system, the state doesn’t require districts to make any personnel decisions on the results. As the state writes in its approved ESEA Flexibility request, “teachers who perform “below expectations” (level 2 of 5) or “significantly below expectations” (level 1 of 5) for two consecutive years may be dismissed by their LEAs.” (emphasis added). Washington, D.C. is one of the few places in the country that systematically identifies and dismisses its low-performers. Since it adopted its IMPACT evaluation system in 2009-10, the District of Columbia Public Schools has dismissed roughly 3 percent of its workforce every year. There is a reason that it makes news when DCPS fires a tiny fraction of its teaching workforce for poor performance. It’s still very unusual.

All this is not to say the trade-offs in The Hangover aren’t important. We may eventually find out that states went too far in specifying the details of teacher and principal evaluation policies. And my colleagues are absolutely right to be concerned about new classroom and schooling structures that move beyond the traditional teacher-in-front-of-25-students model. But when we’re still living in a world where a state has 0.2 percent of its teaching workforce rated ineffective, we still have a ways to go. Hold off on buying that Advil just yet.

RAND has a new teacher effectiveness website – good primer on key issues meets the usual judiciousness of RAND.

I’m going to be tied up with a few things the next few days so Andy Smarick, Rachael Brown, and Chad Aldeman  of Bellwether will be here to inform, provoke, and amuse Tuesday through the end of the week.

Turns out “Won’t Back Down” does struggle with the date night test at the box office this weekend.

Virginia officials keep saying in public and private that critics of the state’s proposed school performance targets are misrepresenting the policy.  Yet they are (a) changing the policy anyway and (b) have yet to actually say where the critics are wrong…In case you missed it, President Obama had a good response on the waiver/differentiated targets issue when asked about it by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie last week.

Pro tip: Drunk college students might be playing you.

I’m not a film critic but I can’t say that I found “Won’t Back Down,” which opens nationally this weekend, to be a great film.  Nonetheless, it’s a very significant one for reasons that have little to do with its predictable storyline and a lot to do with our national conversation about schools. That’s what my TIME column today takes a look at: When mainstream actresses start taking on what would have been politically unpalatable roles just a few years ago, something is happening.

When the journalist Mickey Kaus reviewed cars, he would sometimes ask if they passed the “Saturday night test”—meaning regardless of how well they drove, would he want to pick a date up in one? After watching “Won’t Back Down” a few times in screenings this year, I found myself asking essentially the same question: my wife and I work in education, but I’m not sure the new Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, and Holly Hunter film clears the bar for date night. The predictable storyline feels more like a 1980s after-school special than a big screen movie. But what’s actually on the screen for two hours isn’t what makes “Won’t Back Down” matter so much for education.

The film is about a majority of parents who want to change their school but you don’t need a majority to read the entire column and find out, one click here will do it.

Plenty of rhetoric but here’s some actual research about cash incentives for students via MDRC.

TNTP’s Fishman Prize winners produce essays about their work – the first ones are now out.  Well worth checking out.

Sunday October 14th is Race for a Cause.  It’s a fun 8K run/walk through Arlington, Virginia and if you help Education Pioneers sign up the most runners they get bonus $ support from Acumen.  There are also shorter fun runs. Even if you can’t participate please consider signing up as a way to help EP.

National Indian Education Association conference is focusing on digital this year.

Couple of Edujobs:

Bellwether is partnering with the Tennessee Department of Education to help with a couple of roles including Director of STEM Initiatives. If you are interested or want to nominate a colleague email us. Bellwether is also working with Ednovate, a new CMO in Los Angeles whose mission is eliminating the dropout problem and preparing every student for success in post-secondary education and in the workplace.  They need a CEO. Ednovate was launched by the University of Southern California and its Rossier School of Education.  Ednovate will open and support a network of replicable public charter high schools across the metropolitan Los Angeles region and, ultimately, will expand to other urban centers across the nation.  These schools will distinguish themselves by providing a truly hybrid environment in which students’ social/emotional and academic growth will be supported with both online delivery of academic core courses and collaborative, experiential learning in a local, bricks-and-mortar facility open seven days a week, ten hours a day, and year-round.  The first school, USC Hybrid High School (HHS), opened this month.  Again, questions or nominations email us.

*Edujob post edited for clarity.

In the next “Education Insider” survey some data on Common Core in light of Mitt Romney’s remarks and attention to conservative pushback about the common state standards effort. Here’s a preview of one item (pdf).  When asked whether the inclusion of Common Core in the Democratic Party platform (the document discusses the President’s challenge to states and encouragement for Common Core adoption) this year helps or hurts the Common Core 78 percent of insiders said it will hurt the effort.

In a new paper being released today by AEI my Bellwether colleagues Sara Mead, Rachael Brown and I take a look at teacher evaluation, what’s happening, friction points, and some ideas to make sure that we don’t replace an approach to evaluation that was largely non-existent with one that is perhaps too existent.   Evaluate “The Hangover: Thinking about the consequences of the nation’s teacher evaluation binge” yourself via this link.

Like the rest of the nation, the Harvard Graduate School of Education is polarized.

Big day at Ed Nation this morning with President Obama and Governor Romney on tap. You can watch live online.

David Coleman is profiled in The Atlantic.  In Indy they’re debating different visions of what to do about the schools.*   New York Times looks at teachers unions and Republicans.  Surprise! They’ll work with anyone who can help them. So they look like an interest group, act like an interest group…

Some really interesting and counter-narrative results in this year’s Education Next survey (pdf).

From Chicago, more on having teachers contract negotiations in public.  My take on that issue here via TIME.

More No Child waiver back and forth. US Chamber of Commerce registers its concerns as does George Miller, ranking Democrat on the House committee handing education – he’s concerned about graduation rate accountability.  Related: State Departments of Education – big leverage point not a lot of focus on them.  New CRPE* paper takes a look.

Vouchers going viral? A few years ago I was told clearly by the Century Foundation and others that this would not happen! But Sean Cavanagh takes a look at the landscape.

Today’s edujobs brought to you by the letter E:

At ETS they are looking for a Senior Research Scientist/Associate Director, Center for Research on Human Capital and Education.  Pay commensurate with number of words in the title.

At EDI they need an engagement manager to support their work with states.

*I’m a fellow at CRPE and on the board of the Indy Mind Trust.

There’s some buzz about how what happened in Chicago with the strike really doesn’t matter that much. ‘Nothing to see here, please move along’ say some folks in management and in labor.  Union watcher Mike Antonucci is right that Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis isn’t poised to seize the reins of the American Federation of Teachers. But no matter what different people may hope (for different reasons), what happened this month will have implications for the education labor-management conversation we’ve seen over the past six years.

Let’s start with the big picture: If you asked education analysts who could put an end to the teachers unions political losing streak it’s a safe bet no one would have said Karen Lewis, who was better known nationally for mocking how Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks than as an effective leader outside of her union’s caucus. In the past couple of years teachers unions have hemorrhaged members (the National Education Association more than 100,000), lost key political battles on school choice and teacher evaluation and tenure in a slew of states, and perhaps most notably suffered a stinging rebuke in their efforts to recall Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker after he curbed collective bargaining by public workers. Yet there was the bombastic Lewis – who makes no pretense of being into collaboration or education reform – prevailing in the Chicago teachers strike and breathing new life into dispirited union teachers. Says one large urban teachers union president, “I got emails when they authorized the strike vote beating the drum on this.” The members want to know, “why aren’t we doing this, why aren’t we fighting?”

In Chicago school officials and their allies are working overtime to portray the new teachers’ contract as “an honest compromise” in the words of Mayor Rahm Emanuel or a “legitimate compromise” as influential Chicago education leader Tim Knowles put it in a press release. In practice the city gave a lot of ground on key issues to get kids back in school. Sure, in 2014 thirty percent of teachers evaluations will be based on how much students learn. But that’s state law in Illinois! It’s illegal for the contract to do less. Evaluation results will not be especially consequential anyway. Mediocre teachers can keep their jobs year after year and the great teachers in Chicago will not be protected during layoffs, which will still be determined largely based on seniority rather than effectiveness. It’s unclear meanwhile how the city is going to afford the 17 percent raise it committed to – especially at the same time Chicago’s teacher pension fund is nearing insolvency.  The city won on some issues, too, by protecting principal autonomy and maintaining a sensible policy on guaranteed jobs when there are layoffs because of the downsizing everyone can see coming. But, overall it’s hard to see the agreement as anything but a substantial victory for Lewis and one that will resonate far beyond Chicago.

Within the teachers unions there is considerable debate about how much to work with management on reform and how much to stick to bread and butter issues. For every national pundit lauding the union designed teacher evaluation system in New Haven, Connecticut, Washington, D.C.’s landmark teachers contract, or the American Federation of Teachers support for the teacher evaluation law in Colorado, there are dozens of activists deriding those moves as sellouts.

It’s not an academic debate. With all the attention on elected officials it’s easy to forget that union leaders, too, are elected – by their members. Get too far out of step and you’ll be voted out. That’s how Karen Lewis won the union presidency in Chicago – by painting her predecessor as insufficiently committed to core union issues and promising a harder line with Chicago school administrators. She’s taken her anti-reform message national within the American Federation of Teachers. When Bill Gates was invited to address the American Federation of Teachers convention in 2010 at the invitation of AFT President Randi Weingarten Lewis made no secret of her disapproval and continues to push for a harder line against reform. Now, after what looks like a successful strike, Lewis has a real credential to go with the rhetoric.

Chicago “tore the scab off some wounds that have been healing” one state teachers union leader told me last week in the wake of the strike. Because Lewis was able to create a coalition by uniting younger teachers who support accountability measures but were concerned about issues like classroom overcrowding and health services for students with veterans vehemently opposed to proposals to evaluate teachers more or reform tenure union leaders say they’re paying close attention to how Chicago affects politics within their own unions.

They know the “reform unionism” field is littered with the bodies of union leaders voted out of office after appearing too accommodating with management or school reformers. But reform unionism had a powerful pragmatic argument in its favor: Until the Chicago strike the political choice for unions looked like accommodation and collaboration or irrelevance. Last week Lewis added a third credible option to the mix – strident resistance.

For now leaders in the national teachers unions don’t want to get too close to Lewis publicly – AFT President Weingarten who has spent several years tirelessly trying to repos