Reading between the Lines

Tonight, in my family engagement class, we heard from a Congressional policy advisor: Do you like reading legislation?  If you want to work in policy, you're going to have to read a lot of it--and you'll have to like it.

I've been up to my eyes in English Language Learners this semester in my statehouse internship, and thus far--I can't say I love legislation.  Department of Education regulations ... technical assistance for school districts; they may not be page-turners, but they're at least bereft of looping semicolons and "whereases" that dot the statutory language.  But the law itself?  Not only don't I love it.  It's not even a courtship.

I may not be enamored of legal language, but it's been a blast seeing policy from the inside-out.  The hearings, the advocacy, the urgency: this stuff matters.  And to contribute to the process has been quite gratifying.

But as someone used to writing a lesson plan on Friday to be rolled out next week, state legislation seems to move at an absolutely glacial pace.  And there's something else to adjust to.  Bills are filed, the public weighs in, committees file amendments, semicolons are added, "whereases" tweaked.  If you're lucky, a bill squeaks through committee, gets enough support on the voting floor, and goes to the Governor for a signature.  Sure, it's what we all learned in eighth-grade civics.  But the slowness of it is what stands out in person.

And the tortoise speed of legislative action is mirrored in the distance one might feel from the effect of law. The bill I'm working on right now carries a pearl of frustration precisely because it's not yet clear to me how changing the bill will actually change kids' lives.  It's not clear to me policy is the right arena in which to be fighting the battle.

Some legislation has an impact, maybe even immediate impact.  But much legislation edits around the margins, spawns unintended consequences, or at worst, as we all know this week, is immediately pilloried and targeted for repeal.

And that's something else our guest visitor spoke of today: How often do you need to see the results of your work?

Adult Education's Day (or More?) in the Sun

Back from a few days in Burlington, Vermont, with its 70-degree March weather, and surprisingly good restaurant scene (like this one).

A sure sign of spring's renewal and hope, yesterday: adult education prominently featured in the Boston Globe!  In essence, to respond to the reality that adults go back to get a GED, then find it's not enough to get them a family-supporting job or to succeed in community college, the state is planning to "retool" the system to strengthen the focus on college- and career-readiness:

The effort would lead to increased instructional intensity, more academic and career advising, and a curriculum geared toward college and career readiness, including courses in specialized areas of interest, education officials said.

For me, some takeaways, lots of questions.  First, this move should be seen as part of the overall K-12 conversation about bolstering college and career pathways, and making a more seamless educational system.  Second, while adult education has undergone funding cuts since the recession struck in 2008, a renewed focus on the field might act as a barrier to later cuts. 

That said, it's unclear how the field will be "retooled" from above--despite the positive comments from people in the article, teachers, counselors, and directors will all have to be on-board with, and well-trained, in the new sauce.  And I worry that too strong a focus on merely career preparation--while undoubtedly important to so many GED and ESOL-skills seekers--neglects preparation for the rest of life: to be a citizen, to be a parent, to go to college for broad, not narrow skills. 

Look forward to following this one.

File This Under:

Wonky but Revealing: Cutting Class, a report from MassBudget on the problems--visible and hidden--with the public education funding formula here in the great state of Massachusetts.


The Executive Summary gets the main points, but there are many nuggets throughout the whole text.  Key takeaways: There are some structural and some situational issues with the "foundation budget" for school systems--what  schools spend on their system, minimum, which differs from district to district depending on number of low-income students, distribution of elementary vs. middle vs. high school students, and so forth.

Structural: the formula was set based on 1993 figures, which weren't adjusted once it was signed into law in 1994, thus always lowballing district needs.

Situational: health care costs and special-ed costs are higher than what you might expect.  Many reasons for both, mostly understandable.  The result: districts pull money that could be used for regular ed teachers and other services to fund their legal obligations to special-ed and employee benefits.

Circumlocutionary: By "the great state of Massachusetts," I actually mean, "the Bay State," "the citizens of the great state I governed," or "home," depending on which version you prefer from what Romney used in his victory parity speech tonight.  By my count he did mention the state's name twice, but it was listening to him get around having to say "great" and "Massachusetts" in the same sound-bite-bound sentence was almost as painful as, well, as listening to him speak in general.

By "home," he expanded by way of saying, "It's nice to be home for the first time in two months."  Hmmm.  Hasn't been in Massachusetts in a while?  As my mother might say, that's sort of how he governed.

Policy Takeaway for the Week: It's likely the only major legislation to get through the Massachusetts Statehouse before summer is the budget, and a bill to contain health-care costs.

First reaction: man, that's slow.  Why doesn't anything ever get accomplished in politics?

Second reaction: considering how much health care eats up the state budget, a health-care bill is an education bill, a transportation bill, a community-development bill.  In theory--the devil will be in the details, of course.

Right Questions

My family-engagement class had its first guest visit yesterday.  

I'm not usually the biggest fan of guest visits.  I loved this one.

Our visitors were representatives of the Right Question Institute.  They didn't have the right question, but they wanted to help us get there.

It was a night of doing.  Our guests didn't tell us about the RQI so much as they led us through it.  According to Right Question's Web site, RQI

promotes the use of a simple, powerful, evidence-based strategy that helps all people, no matter their level of income, literacy or education, learn to help themselves.

How?  Through a deceptively simple process of getting folks to generate their own questions.  Broken into groups of five or six, we were handed a small paper squares containing four math problems: 3+2=5, etc.  

Hypothetical: You are parents of a first-grader.  This is the assignment.  What are your questions? 

One person scribed.  The rest of us asked.  She wrote.  RQI doesn't seem to have what you'd call a Roberts-Rules-of-Order DNA, but structure us they did: No stopping to edit or judge.  Question is copied exactly as is.  Change statements to questions.  Ask as many questions as possible.

Is my child ready for this?

What was the process that led to teaching this?

Will this be on a test? ...

We were then handed new squares.  They had four math problems, too--the same ones.  This time, though--we were parents of twelfth-graders.  Ask away.

After these first rounds (lasting two minutes), we were asked to do a few more things: change some open-ended questions to closed, and vice-versa; pick our top-three priority queries; and so forth. 

What's the point?  For whom is this?  In our class context, an obvious use would be by a parent coordinator at a school to spark parents to ask questions leading to deeper school involvement or advocacy.  The facilitators suggested that to promote "microdemocracy"--authentic involvement in the institutions that affect you immediately and daily--requires questioning reasons and process and role.  What was the basis for this decision?  How was it made, and who participated in making it?  What can I do?

**

Are we asking ourselves the right questions about education?  

This morning, I read a 2005 piece by a prominent, respected, and mainstream ed organization proposing ways educators and policymakers can strengthen American high schools.  

An eye toward preventing dropouts and getting kids ready for college or career: very well.  

"Global competitiveness ... rigor ... college readiness ... business leaders are saying ... global competitiveness ... the need for workers who can ... including these measures on tests ..."  

Valid things all.

Do I support strong high schools?  Absolutely.  Have I benefitted from rigorous classes? Most definitely.  Is it crucial that kids have the skills to get good jobs in which they can grow and prosper?  Of course.  

But kids are also citizens.  And developing human beings.  Buried somewhere about halfway in, I found "interest" and "hobby."  Pretty sure "joy," "enthusiasm," and "democracy" didn't make it.  Let alone "asking their own questions."  

Most would say that education for economic success is valuable.  And I don't disagree.  But this read like a style manual for a generation of widgets.  Is that the best we can do? 

Limits

This week, a plunge into something new.  I'm interning at the Statehouse working on education policy. Firsts: first time working in a government building, first time walking through a metal detector to get to the office.  We all deal with policy--ramifications, fallouts--on a daily basis.  But--first time dealing with it from the inside-out.

My first day my supervisor handed me a three-inch-thick binder.  Instructions: learn everything you can about English Language Learners.  I put my head in the binder and emerged a few hours later swimming in Whereas this and Ch. that. 

The inherent limits of policy strike me right off the bat.  I'm not in an ELL classroom, and most of the briefs and reports I've read don't make me feel like I am.  I'd love to read some organized testimony of teachers: what's it like to do this work?  What do you think the law should say?  I'm sure it's out there for the finding.

Even if policy is informed by the grassroots, how much of current, or amended, policy can reach back to the classroom?  Should reach that deep?

**

It's an interesting way to learn.  Before Wednesday, I knew almost nothing about ELLs.  I know something more about language acquisition.  This is perhaps the most transactual learning I've ever done.  Learning for the purpose of tweaking a bill that has already been written.  Learning just enough, in compressed time, to suggest those tweaks.  Borrowing ideas already in use in other states.  Writing to the constraints of four-page policy memos.  Will it feel liberating, having so specific an outcome?  Will it feel limiting?

**

It was a hard decision to drop my fifth class.  I was already feeling overwhelmed by the workload.  I found myself stringing together 14-hour days, yet still not fully engaging with the work in some courses.  I pulled the plug on an extra quantitative class, in favor of being able to dive more deeply into projects I'm passionate about in other classes.  I think it's the right tradeoff.

The limit to the one-year program is always having to make these trade-offs. 

I already feel better.  I can follow through on having a discussion group for a class.  Talking through readings solidifies learning for me.  I'm excited all over again for this last semester.

**

An observation this year: I miss the grassroots.  I miss my students, my class.  I miss the crafting of lessons, the buzz of carrying them out, the lightbulbs when folks make connections.  The new recruits for the next course.  I loved--love--working with adults to help them overcome the limits of not speaking English.  I miss pushing the limits of practice.

I'm trying to heed the voices of my passions as I answer the $39,500 question: What Comes Next?  I came to grad school because I wanted to touch more than a dozen or two lives at a time.  I came because I saw my students confronting the realities of living poor in Boston and wanted to be part of a movement that could holistically address, upend, change those realities.

Should I go back to a classroom?  I don't think having a foot (heart, head) back in the grassroots need be seen as a limit.  I'd love to do good work on the ground and connect to good work at the 10, 20, 30,000 foot level.  Not sure how.  Still working on the roadmap.

What's the Problem?

For Arts of Communication class, Kennedy School of Government.  Assignment: Deliver a speech stating a problem and proposing solutions.  NB: Constrained by a four-minute max, there's a lot I couldn't get to.  And the story's true--but the name Maria Gomez isn't.

A year and a half ago, Maria Gomez, a woman in her mid-thirties who had immigrated from Peru about a year before, stepped to the microphone in the event room in a small human-services agency in Roxbury.  She stood upright, her black hair pulled back over a pressed white blouse.  She was one of a group of adults graduating from a 5-month, twelve hour a week, English as a Second Language class.  She looked out at the crowd, and said, “When I went to the doctor’s for an appointment with my children, before, I had problems.  Now when I go to the doctor’s, I say, I don’t need a translator.”  In a place more accustomed to the artful speeches of Nanci Pelosi or David Brooks, it might seem curious to highlight the testimonial of a low-income immigrant parent.  Around here, it’s easy to overlook the adults in our community who lack basic skills.  Rather than overlook these folks, though, let’s give them a closer look.  The Roxbury program Maria graduated from was one I started and ran for two years; my adult education experience has taken me into consulting and teacher-training.  So today, I’d like to describe the problem of immigrant literacy—and recommend some solutions.

Maria is not alone.  2 million immigrants enter the US annually; half of them either have low literacy or don’t speak English.  There are many consequences: let me focus on two: our economy—and our next generation.  First, all the research shows, if we’re going to maintain America’s global competitiveness, our workers must get better skills.  To this, some would say, why focus on helping immigrants make a big leap in their skills?  Why not focus on workers who already speak English and have some skills, helping them make the small steps to move up in the economy?  The answer brings me to our second consequence: the next generation.  More and more, our K-12 students are the children of immigrants.  And a parent with low literacy is less likely to pay attention to their kids’ homework or pick up the phone and call their teacher.  The struggle for adult literacy is a struggle for the economy and for our children.  And Maria is a great example of what’s possible: after my class, she kept studying English, got her citizenship, and started a Home Health Aide training program. 

Maria's an example of someone with low skills who found a solution.  The bigger problem is, we’re not serving enough people like Maria, and we’re not serving them well enough.  That’s a two-fold problem: capacity and quality.  First, capacity: Right here in Cambridge, go down Mass Ave about a mile to the Community Learning Center.  Their waitlist is 434 people long.  Statewide, a study in the 90s verified there were 15,000 people on waitlists for ESL.  That means months or years waiting for a seat.  Second, quality.  According to a national evaluation, a third of all adult ESL students leave class within the first two months.  Why does somebody drop out?  He doesn’t feel like he’s making much progress.  Or programs hold classes during the day—and that’s when his job is.

Let me move to solutions.  The adult literacy field needs something like what the Celtics have needed for two years: to get bigger, and get better.  First, the bigger part.  Proposing more funding for anything is a tough sell these days.  But an investment in education is a down payment for our economy and our kids.  That argument may not carry the day everywhere, but it sure does in some places.  Indeed, right here, in his recent State of the Commonwealth speech, Governor Patrick proposed building workers’ skills, in part through increased funding for community colleges—which happen to be a key bridge to higher skills for many immigrants.  That wisdom for investing in the future should be extended to adult ESL.  But an alternative to government support are public-private partnerships.  In Chinatown, the Asian American Civic Association goes into Tufts Medical Center, and offers three levels of ESL for hospital employees.  It’s good for everyone, and Tufts picks up the tab. 

           

           Some will ask: why make a system bigger when it hasn’t proven its effectiveness at current scale?  To address that serious concern brings me to my second solution: Should adult-education get bigger, it must get much, much better.  That third of students who drop out?  We need to get them to where Maria got.  The best solutions will probably come from the dedicated teachers who understand how to work with adults.  But here are a few of my ideas: locate ESL programs in K-12 schools, and provide daycare.  Increase professional development for teachers to provide an engaging curriculum that students like and learn from.  And make sure students are in the right classroom in the first place.  Increase assessment when students start class—what does Maria already know?  What does she struggle with?—and get students in a class with others at similar levels, so they aren’t lost, or bored.  Those are a few ideas: there are many more. 

           As future policymakers, I ask you: when the conversation turns to education, please think of it beyond just K-12.  Think of adults, too.  As citizens, I ask you: when we talk about immigration, let’s move beyond culture or who doesn’t belong.  Let’s move the conversation to the skills everyone needs.  Let’s move the conversation to how to help more people get those skills, and help themselves, their children, and our entire economy.  Thank you. 

Modest Proposals (for Family Engagement)

Adapted from a class activity on engaging families of children aged 0-5.  Assignment: Develop a slogan and talking points to be used by the Secretary of Education to promote literacy and learning development.  What our team came up with, in 25 minutes, minus the snazzy poster:

Get Active: Read!

Books are for babies too!

            Even babies can benefit from regular exposure to shared bookreading.  Reading to your child teaches them how to listen, associate words with meaning and helps their overall language development.

Ask!  Point!  Talk!

            When your child is old enough to talk, ask them questions about what you’ve read.  Point to the words on the page.  This helps your child learn their letters and prepares them for preschool.  Let them help turn the pages of the book.  Talk to your child about what is happening in the story, what the characters are doing and what they think will happen next.  Don’t forget to hold your child on your lap while you read so they learn in a nurturing space.

Libraries: Free and Friendly!

            Where can reading happen?  Your public library provides a completely free, safe space for your child to take a book journey.  Library cards are free and allow you to check out books and take them home.  Your child can also listen to storytellers read books to them with other children in your community.  With thousands of books to explore, your supply will never run out.

Early reading experiences help unlock the gift of lifelong learning for your child!

Sharing the Love

I've written before about my fascination with--and questions for--cradle-to-career programs like the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati.  Education Sector just put out a report on Strive, a collaborative effort by countless schools, nonprofits, and businesses to support positive academic achievement for children along a continuum from birth to college completion.

There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive.  To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways.  Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders.  Who convened them?  Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher.  It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work.  Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding.  Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River.  And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.

The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:

• Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
• The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"  
• Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene

The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.

I Used to Think ...

"We need a course where we can pull together what we're learning in our three other courses." --classmate Z.


That course wasn't there for me to take, but as much as often this semester I've tried to pull together what I've learned.  In September, facing readings flush with theory that felt far removed from the classrooms I'd taught in and the immigrant parents I'd worked with, I felt like I was being asked to predict weather patterns at 40,000 feet based on how I felt the wind blowing over my face.  As time went on, I sensed progress, most notably when I opened my mouth in class, started, "In another class I'm taking, we've been studying X ..." and could make the link back.  Taking a reading from class A to integrate into an essay in class B: another good sign.  I can't completely make the jump from ground to cruising altitude yet (I leave that for the basketball court; oh, wait).  But I'm gaining hops.

I learned a lot about a lot of stuff, from the mundane to the pointy-headed: parent-engagement techniques in districts and charters, Common Core, methods to improve child protective services, promotive and protective factors in child development, how foundations affect school reform, an eye-opening amount of management theory, an eye-crossing amount of stats.  On a personal front, I've worked on communication, from how to use hand gestures to voicing dissent in a way that informs new consensus.  I've learned how to manage time much better (and only been made fun of for my 15-minute increments ... 200 times plus/minus 100 times by T.).  On a professional front, I've had many conversations with folks in numerous fields, to the point that I got an email back confirming an informational interview a couple weeks ago and found myself staring at the subject line thinking: Catie who?  Works where? (It was in the email; all's well).

I'm one stats project (speaking of that), two final papers, and three class evaluations away from being done.  But taking a moment to glimpse the light ahead, some changes in my thinking.  Warning: these are (a) a Sample, (b) Broad, (c) General, and (d) Obvious in some cases.  The more nitty-gritty stuff ... well, I'll leave that for my posts on ESOL techniques.


I used to think ... in terms what I saw right in front of my eyes; now I think, not only that way, but also in frameworks, strategies, concepts.

I used to think that business practices were cold; now I think they can inform many types of management.


I used to think of cradle-to-career work in terms of starting programs, a la the Harlem Children's Zone; now I think collective impact might work better in many places.


I used to think of consulting as outside my interests; now I think that consulting assistance has helped spur great initiatives that I'm very much interested in (see here and here).


I used to think about poverty in terms of the experiences of the students in my class; now I most definitely still think about them, but also about funding issues, building support to sustain policy changes, strengths-based interventions, targeting vs. universal, and more.

I used to think that early parenting classes were mainly site-based, or classroom-based; now I think that home-visiting may be the key to making them productive.

I used to think that national foundations were too aggressive in promoting school reform; now I think they have a role in advancing knowledge in the field and, yes, putting their money out there to spur innovation (insert many caveats here).

I used to think a mission statement was crucial to keeping an organization focused on what matters; now I think that's still important, but should also be accompanied by strategic action steps, a theory of change, a theory of action, and criteria for ways to measure those actions.  

Oh god, the profs have gotten in my blood.  Back to that stats.

Politico Pith: Choice Thoughts from the State Secretary of Education

Not gonna say it was quite like seeing Lady Gaga walk into our library basement, but it was pretty cool.  Just a few (paraphrased) nuggets able to persist through my stats-addled brain-fog:

We hold school time constant and let learning vary.  We need to flip those: everybody to mastery, no matter how long it takes.

One of my big problems with NCLB was that it overidentified underperforming schools but didn't give states the money to help those schools.   

Teacher evaluation has to be based in part on student achievement.  It's a common sense connection parents know.  Last year she had a poor teacher and hated math.  This year she loves her teacher and math's her favorite subject.

If you want to guarantee great turnout at a school committee meeting out in the suburbs, don't propose revamping the reading curriculum--propose changing the school day by 20 minutes.

We just voted to do the first state takeover of a school system, in Lawrence.  I was at a school in a different city yesterday, and I was sitting there talking to those people, thinking, We should take over this district, too.

How Much, or How?

Ooh boy, Nicholas Kristof writing about all the things I care about! 

He gets right to the point about how little public funding goes to children under age 5.  And to how early investments in children actually have documented cost-benefit pay-offs.

Kristof's also refreshingly frank in taking on Head Start questions.  He admits what we've long known, that some gains (e.g. IQ) for kids who go through HS wear off quickly.  But he points out that "the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty."  Those are really important measures, especially when you consider how repeating grades sets kids up to drop out.

His closing point is: we can't afford not to fund early childhood.  But it's not just a question of how much funding early-childhood gets.  It's a question of how programs are run.

Problem is, quality of day-care varies a lot.  And overall, the picture isn't pretty--some programs are excellent, others terrible, most in-between.  That variation happens even within a government-funded program like Head Start, not to mention in the ever-growing area of private day-care.  Are play areas safe?  Are teachers well-trained?  Are adult-child interactions engaging?  These are not side questions, they are the main questions.

Dumping a whole lot of money into early-childhood without ways of ensuring programs are actually well-run won't do much for the disadvantaged kids Kristof cares about.  Kids from tough backgrounds need great programs, not just more programs.

NCLB Stew

Piece at the Times about Tom Harkin's NCLB re-write.  Still waiting for more analysis, but I was struck by this quotation from Grover Whitehurst:

“Harkin’s bill would return control to the state departments of education and the local school districts, and they’re the ones that got us into the mess that No Child was designed to fix,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who headed the Department of Education’s research wing under President Bush. “Districts and states have not been effective in delivering quality education to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so why should we think they’ll be effective this time around?”

Okay, okay, states and districts haven't always taken the lead in promoting achievement.  Or rarely.  We can debate that.  But it's not like NCLB had much to say about instruction and achievement, either, except to set pie-in-the-sky goals of universal proficiency by 2014 and impose punitive consequences (that were actually pretty easy to escape through the "other" option of school turnaround)  for those not on track. 

The idea that simply raising motivation to get improve achievement was sufficient to get the process going failed on two fronts.  First, it left states to fix, fiddle, and nip data to "show" proficiency.  Second, it's proposals for creating better options for kids were a) tutoring and b) transfer.  Leaving aside whether this is actually an effective way to raise all boats, only tiny, tiny numbers of kids took those up.  NCLB didn't deal much with capacity of teachers and schools, nor with good fallback plans.

Harkin's bill may not be stellar--I for one am interested to learn more--but it's slipshod to hold up NCLB as the original, responsible alternative.

ConStrived?

I had a fascinating conversation Friday with a self-described "instigator" who's helping lead a replication of the STRIVE Together program of the Cincinnati area elsewhere in the Midwest.

Such organizations are modeled loosely off the Harlem Children's Zone and attempt to create cradle-to-career pathways for kids in disadvantaged areas.  These Midwestern models differ from HCZ in that they are larger than 100 square blocks and promote collaboration among existing agencies.  And their funding is different--I mean, not everyone can be hand-in-glove with Wall Street, right?

Here's what else the Other Midwest Plan has going for it: business, community, and school-district buy-in.  Focus on STEM subjects: science, technology, math.  Accountability measures from top-to-bottom, including managed instruction and continuous improvement plans.  Use of great practices from across the country.  Assurance of on-the-ground quality, through plenty of support and professional development for teachers, out-of-school time programs for kids, inclusion of volunteer labor.  Emphasis on kindergarten readiness.  I took the devil's-advocate pose over and over, and got pretty satisfying answers back.

When what started as a 20-minute call ended at an hour, I thought: Wow, this Other Midwest Plan sounds great!  ...

... But is it too good to be true? 

The rapid dissemination of the cradle-to-career idea (which I've written about before) is encouraging, insofar as I think it's a good way to frame the movement to achieve legitimate outcomes for kids from tough backgrounds.  But it's also a new path full of booby-traps. 

A few questions that I think must be addressed:

• How does the laudable focus on educational achievement not get narrowed to outcomes in math and English (or, in a better world, math, English, and science)?  
• How do you avoid imposing so much quantitatively-based accountability that you create (unfortunate but plausible) incentives to "teach to the test," or worse, manipulate data?  How do you create broad, fair evaluations?
• We know that quality of teaching and adult-child interaction are so important in both K-12 classrooms and daycare.  How do C2C programs assure that the consensual, progress-oriented message from movement leaders is not diluted at the grassroots level?  More to the point, how do they plan to increase the supply of effective front-line practitioners, especially in an era of fiscal retrenchment?
• The C2C approach is warm, fuzzy, and consensus-oriented.  It sometimes seems everybody's determinedly on the same page--or at least trying to get there.  What if the consensus is wrong?
• How do you make room for (Business-Speak Alert) "process correction" or continuous reflection, when you're keeping a good face up to secure grant money and political will?  
• Many of the major social advances in American history grew out of mobilization and politicization of people at the grassroots.  People spoke up and got angry, and things changed (see Civil Rights, women's rights, the Voting Rights Act).  Can a movement that is so--in some ways--bloodless have long-term impact?
• How do you keep funders and agencies working together?  If funding pulled back at some point, or results were uneven between agencies, wouldn't agencies be tempted to steer their own ship again?
• Isn't this an idea from Rich White Men for poor people of color?

NCLB Soup

If Law A guaranteed 100 percent student proficiency, but was only10 percent implementable, and Law Y shot for only 80 percent student proficiency but was 80 percent implementable, which would you prefer?

Interesting piece at The New Republic by Kevin Carey (Ed Sector) about the Obama Administration's tweaks to NCLB.  Basically, takes the moon-shot "everyone achieves by 2014" mandate away while empowering teachers and schools and states to do the things NCLB didn't properly address, like helping students meet stable standards, teacher quality, authentic school turnaround.

Meanwhile, Carey casts a plan among some Republicans to back away from NCLB as long-term retreat from federal spending obligations masking as nostalgia for the good old days when the Feds kept their hands out of the schools.

As far as Obama is concerned, while I never worshiped him as The Second Coming, I voted for him, would do it again, and will do it again (short of some major shift in the political landscape leading to a sudden embrace of Mitt Romney ... oh wait, yeah, I'm voting for Obama).  I share many reservations about his term, including some with the still-cohering Occupy Wall Street movement.

But he has initiated many "tweaks" that could have positive long-term impacts, like changing funding formulas for usually earmark-riddled energy and transportation sectors, this NCLB work, RTTT, and so on.  In that sense he has been more manager than leader--despite the oratory skills we all know.  Is it enough to be a President of "tweaks"?  No, and that may spell doom for him come next November.  But worth watching the long-term impacts.