Time to Leave Federalizing of Education Behind (Forbes.com) February 10, 2015

Washington, D.C. has managed to take the most basic state and local responsibility—K-12 education—and federalize it at breathtaking speed over the last 12 years.  Now, with the signature piece of federalizing legislation, No Child Left Behind, up for reauthorization in Congress, it is time to put the brakes on this failed and misguided federal experiment.  In short, forget no child—what needs to be left behind is the federalizing of education.

How did this happen anyway?  Although Lyndon Johnson stuck the federal nose in the K-12 education tent in the mid-60’s, providing special federal aid for poor and disadvantaged children in his War on Poverty, the real momentum developed when President George W. Bush sought to bring his “Texas miracle” on education to Washington as the “education president.”  Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy famously got together and enacted No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, laying the groundwork for federal testing and accountability which now dominate the educational scene.

But wait, there’s more.  When, by 2012, it was clear that 80% of America’s schools would not meet NCLB’s goal of proficiency for every student by 2014, with resulting embarrassment for politicians and draconian penalties for schools, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan began issuing waivers (to over 40 states) lifting NCLB’s requirements.  If schools cannot reach the federal bar, well then the obvious solution was to lower or eliminate the bar.  But Duncan did not just waive the requirements for states, rather he did so on the condition that states agree to new conditions he sought to impose that would further change the direction of K-12 education, including strong moves toward a national curriculum (Common Core) and teacher evaluation and accountability.  These were debates properly taking shape in the states, but suddenly the Department of Education took sides and imposed a federal solution.

As South Carolina law professor Derek W. Black points out in a forthcoming issue of Vanderbilt Law Review, however, the Secretary’s conditional waivers were constitutionally problematic in two ways.  First, imposing new educational policy requirements on states through conditional waivers was a step that, under the balance of powers between Congress and an executive agency, only Congress could approve.  And second, this became a form of federal coercion on the states, essentially bribing the states with federal money to follow federal policy.  Over 40 states succumbed.  As Professor Black concludes:  “With no more power than the authority to waive noncompliance with NCLB, Secretary Arne Duncan achieved a goal that educational equality advocates had long sought, but never secured:  the federalization of aspects of public education.”

As Congress debates the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the real conversation should be about rolling back the federal role in K-12 education.  Over half a trillion dollars in federal money has been spent on this experiment, with very little to show for it, according to the independent Center on Educational Policy and others who have studied the results.  The federal Department of Education has become, in effect, what Senator Lamar Alexander has called “a national school board” micromanaging educational policy and outcomes.  Finally states have awakened to what they have given up and there is a backlash against the Common Core, which is spreading to the NCLB reauthorization debate.

It’s time to admit a federal failure here.  Unrealistic goals were set and federal officials have done unconstitutional hand-stands to mitigate the damage.  Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent.  Teachers and students spend countless hours teaching to the new federal tests.  Plenty of children have been left behind. Enough already.

Let’s return educational policy and authority close to home, to school districts and ultimately the states.  Let’s not reauthorize No Child Left Behind and instead begin the painful and difficult shifting of both money and authority home to districts and states.

Link to Forbes.com:  http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2015/02/10/time-to-leave-federalizing-of-education-behind/

America’s Teachers Are Sharing Their Low Grades With America’s Children (Forbes.com) July 14, 2013

Nobody likes bad grades on a report card, especially not educators whose life work is teaching and grading. It was an unhappy day, then, when a recent and exhaustive national study of teacher training in America’s schools and departments of education came back with grades largely ranging from mediocre to poor. Not only is this a black eye on the colleges and universities that prepare teachers, but it brings into sharp relief a key reason why America’s elementary and secondary schools are delivering such poor results educating our kids.

Your intuitive sense that teachers are crucial to student learning—based on recalling how a classroom works, or how much a particular teacher could inspire you or bore you—is absolutely right. An earlier study by Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution shows that removing or improving the bottom 5-10% of teachers would itself move American education near the top of highest-performing countries. Professor Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington confirms that teacher quality is the biggest single factor influencing student achievement.

And it is also true that how teachers are prepared is a crucial element in the quality of their performance. Unfortunately, as the new and comprehensive study by the National Council on Teacher Quality demonstrates, teacher preparation is overwhelmingly mediocre in the U.S., and sometimes downright bad. After studying over 1100 teacher training programs, experts found that only 4 programs received the top grade (4 stars) and fewer than 10% received even 3 stars. As a consequence, new teachers simply are not well prepared, and it shows up in poor classroom management by novice teachers. One study in Los Angeles showed that first-year teachers actually have a negative impact on student learning.

One problem is that schools of education do not believe it is their job to teach skills or knowledge of the content their graduates will teach. You might logically ask, if they don’t teach skills or content, what do they teach? According to the recent study, the field of teacher education feels it is their job to “prepare” teachers, but not to train them. They view their role as “forming the professional identities of teachers.” I suppose it is what we call in law school, learning to think like a lawyer. That is nice, I suppose, but not when teachers go “live” in the classroom with almost no supervision and a roomful of students who need help.

Failure to require that teachers learn the content they will teach—math or history—seems at least as troublesome, especially in the higher grades where the subject matter is more complex. When one of our children moved from public schools to a private boarding school for one year, the main difference we noticed is that the teachers were often young men and women with master’s degrees in the subject they were teaching. They often did not have the teaching credential required in public schools, but instead a master’s degree in history or science that brought tremendous knowledge and enthusiasm that the students quickly caught. Rather than some of the dull and poorly managed classrooms our child experienced at home, this school was on fire with teacher/student enthusiasm and learning.

By allowing teacher training programs to emphasize professional identity, rather than skills or content, young teachers are not ready to teach even basic skills such as reading. The NCTQ study found that teachers were by and large encouraged to find their own methods for teaching reading and, as a result, children are failing to become proficient readers. Similarly few programs help aspiring teachers learn anything as practical as classroom management skills, for which their later students pay a huge price.
Further, student teaching preparation is described by the study as rarely rigorous.

Hats off then to the 4 programs (out of 1100) that are judged to be doing a great job: Vanderbilt and Lipscomb, both in Nashville, along with Ohio State and Furman in South Carolina. If you plan to be a teacher, you should consider preparing in these star programs and, indeed, the rest of the field should be paying attention to what they are doing right. As we recently learned at nearby San Francisco airport, having pilots land airplanes without sufficient preparation can be fatal. Can we be any less committed to training the people who will educate our own children and America’s future leaders and workers?

Link to Forbes.com op/ed: http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddavenport/2013/07/14/americas-teachers-are-sharing-their-low-grades-with-americas-children/

A nation still at risk (San Francisco Chronicle) March 3, 2003

Educational reform is a tough business to be in. Twenty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education shocked the country with its “A Nation at Risk” report. This distinguished panel nailed its reform theses on the schoolhouse door, telling us that a “rising tide of mediocrity” in our nation’s schools threatened the “intellectual, moral and spiritual strengths of our people” and “our very future as a nation.”

Now a new commission of 11 leading education scholars tells us that, on the 20th anniversary of that landmark report, our children are still at risk.

The Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, assembled by the Hoover Institution and funded largely by San Francisco’s Koret Foundation, has issued a 378-page report reviewing the state of American education today in light of the work of the commission 20 years ago.

Despite widespread acceptance of the “Nation at Risk” report, and considerable increases in education spending, the Koret Task Force concludes that very few important reforms have actually been implemented and almost no improvement in our schools has occurred. Much talk, a little action and few results — this is the sidetrack every reformer fears.

Of course, the road to reform is paved with good intentions. The commission told schools they needed to strengthen high school graduation requirements in the basic curriculum; adopt higher, measurable standards for academic performance; increase the time spent in school and on homework; and strengthen the teaching profession. Educators by and large agreed.

But the new Koret study concludes that few reforms were actually implemented. As a consequence student test scores show little change — slight improvements in math, returning scores to 1970s levels, and no change in verbal proficiency. The school year is no longer and homework is no heavier, through the Koret scholars did not interview my family about that. Graduation rates in the United States have actually declined during this period. Like the old saw, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.

Obviously nailing reform ideas on the schoolhouse door was not enough. As the Koret study notes, the 1983 report was stronger on diagnosis than prescription. But more than that, there are forces outside the schoolhouse that prevent major reforms within. Among these, the recent Koret report especially notes the role of teachers’ unions in blocking major reform.

A look at which reforms have been implemented and which have not seems to confirm that teachers’ unions have heavily influenced the process. For example, reforms the union favor such as spending and smaller classes have been adopted, even though the latter was not even recommended by the commission and the data in support of it is scant, at best. On the other hand, reforms the unions do not support — longer school years and pay for performance — have not been implemented.

The Koret Task Force aims its reform ideas more directly at the larger educational and political system, calling for transparency, accountability and choice. Transparency would allow parents and regulators to see results of school, teacher and student performance more clearly. Accountability would set and measure clear standards. And choice undergrids the other reforms by allowing parents to vote with their feet and send students to another public or even private school if they wish.

In California, the picture is mixed. On one hand, we are becoming far more rigorous in testing and providing reports on schools. On the other hand, we have succumbed to the temptation to reduce class size, an expensive reform in a tight budget environment that is not well supported by research. California voters have consistently rejected school choice initiatives.

Increasingly experts recognize that reform and improvement will not occur inside our schools without community and political will from the outside. In that sense, the Koret recommendations for reform, which include levers of change from the outside, may be more effective than tacking more theses on the schoolhouse door.

This op/ed appeared on Page B-5.