Cooking the Books: Healthcare and Education

We count healthcare costs twice in policy discussions, once when talking about per capita health care costs and again when talking about any costs of government which have an employee health care component. A prime example is education funding: in calculations of per pupil spending there is a substantial component of healthcare costs for education workers and their dependents. By double dipping, and counting these costs once on the health care ledger, and again on the education ledger, we are inflating the costs of government and distorting the policy discussion.

This distortion plays into the radical right's push to "shrink government until it can be drown in the bathtub."  If we debate public policy on the basis of funny numbers, if we don't even acknowledge how the books have been cooked, we are not going to have decent outcomes.

How can we compare ourselves to countries like Finland, which pays for universal healthcare from a healthcare budget and universal education from an education budget?  Of course their per-pupil spending is going to be lower!  They don't use revenue raised for the purpose of educating children to pay for private health insurance for education workers and their dependents.  They don't use schools as a mechanism for keeping employees and their families healthy.  That makes so much sense.

As Pasi Sahlberg explains, you can't understand Finnish education outside of the context of their wraparound social democracy.  And a corollary must be that you can't understand American education and its successes and failures without taking into account our context.  This includes the growing momentum of the neo-liberal program which is systematically dismantling government and consigning public good to the for-profit sector.

There is another subtler distortion.  When you have a childhood poverty level approaching 25% (which no other advanced nation tolerates) the effectiveness of every dollar spent on education is diminished.  When children arrive at school suffering health, food, transportation, or housing insecurity, or when they arrive from families stressed by the threat of those things, they are not going to be as ready and able to learn.  Families under economic stress lack the capacity to effectively support children as learners.

A nation which heaps the inefficiencies of its own injustice onto its education system is going to have to pay a lot more for any type of educational outcome.  It doesn't mean that education has failed, just that we are asking unreasonable things.  You have to use the right tool on the right job.  You don't plow fields with a family sedan.  You don't cut boards with a hammer.  Yes, we need great public schools.  But we also need to provide those schools with comprehensive institutional supports so that children arrive ready to learn.

That would require acceptance of a concept of public good.  It would require us to accept that the health, education, transportation, nutrition and housing of individuals in our society is not just a matter of private interest to them, but also a matter of great public interest, because societal failure is the sum of vast numbers of personal tragedies.  JFK put it in positive terms: "A rising sea lifts all boats."

State Teams Featured at LMC2

The second United States Department of Education Labor Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) is convening in Cincinnati this week.  The theme is harnessing the power of labor management collaboration in the interest of student achievement.  I attended the last conference in Denver fifteen months ago as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows.  In addition to becoming steeped in the theory and practice of labor management collaboration, I had the opportunity to network with several leaders from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), which is an extraordinary organization that provides free technical assistance to improve negotiations outcomes at the local level.   That learning has proven very influential in changing the tenor of our local negotiations during the last year.

There is an innovation of this year’s LMC that is critically important: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants.  Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, are presenting.  These states will highlight work they have done to support districts in collaborative work.  Vermont is sending a team of statewide leaders, which I find tremendously encouraging.  We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the good work in our state which is already happening at the local level.  I am confident that our state leaders will find inspiration and practical ideas at the conference to help us move forward.

Mere process reform, however is not enough.  Sustainability of our work ultimately depends on connecting to a greater goal: great student learning.  Leaders at ED already get this; it is a theme of both labor management conferences.  In Vermont, for us to take it to the next level, and to be able to deal creatively and proactively with 21^st century education policy challenges, stakeholders need to refocus on this goal.  Thinking about collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation.  Our CBA’s must become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools.  When I think of the tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont, I see a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to our common enterprise of great student learning.  Our children deserve no less.

Equitable Funding of Public Education

My friend and colleague Gamal Sherif teaches at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.  We are both Teaching Ambassador Fellows for the US Department of Education (Gamal this year and me last year), and members of the Teacher Leader Network Forum, part of the Center for Teaching Quality.  We are both also union activists - I'm NEA and Gamal is AFT.  What I love about our friendship is the differences: I’m a rural elementary teacher and Gamal is an urban high school teacher, yet across these differences we share so much.  Gamal’s asked me to share his latest blog post and I urge people to follow his excellent blog ProgressEd.

Public education is underfunded because of:

1.       mis-management

2.       mis-use of our military in countries like Afghanistan

3.       warped emphasis on privatized wealth at the expense of the common good

Here are a few examples:

·         In 2001, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reported that the State of Pennsylvania had taken over the Philadelphia School District. How has that oversight helped students and teachers be more engaged? What stability or efficiencies has state oversight provided? Most importantly, what are examples of effective school district organization? How can we help teachers create effective working conditions so that they and their students can flourish?

·         In 2011, The Washington Post reported that "[t]he U.S. military is on track to spend $113 billion on its operations in Afghanistan this fiscal year, and it is seeking $107 billion for the next." Are there better uses for that money?

·         The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that the outgoing CEO of Sunoco is receiving about $37 million in compensation for liquidating assets. How can we create a sustainable economy that honors labor and fosters a commitment to the social good? Individual excellence is essential, but we are all more effective when we advance social equity along with individual liberty.

If the explanations for inequitable funding of public education are accurate (numbers 1, 2 and 3 above), then what are the solutions?  Below is my list -- what's yours?

Federal solutions:

·         Reauthorize a modified ESEA that acknowledges "college and career readiness" with an emphasis on systemic creation of "school readiness." All children should arrive at school safe, well-fed, well-rested, and curious.

·         Re-visit the 14th Amendment and the Brown v. Board of Ed. decision with consideration of funding inequities that create a "suspect class." All schools should be able to fund education at equal (if not equitable) levels.

State solutions:

·         Ensure teacher representation on state-wide panels that roll-out RTTT.

·         Ensure equitable funding of all school districts akin to NJ's Abbott decisions.

District solutions:

·         Create real equitable choice options so that students can attend schools of interest anywhere in the city -- or across District boundaries.

·         Develop and sustain teacher leadership so that teachers lead the integration of curriculum, instruction, assessment and policy that engages students and teachers.

Union solutions:

·         Integrate the labor frame with professional and social justice frames for a enriched unionism.

·         Cultivate cohorts of teacher leaders who are connected and can advocate for effective working conditions, participate in teacher-led research, and foster democratic learning environments .

Administrative solutions:

·         Provide operational flexibility for principals to build community partnerships, coach teachers, know students, and build the capacity of learning organizations.

·         Require extensive support for nurses, social workers, therapists and counselors so that all students with diverse needs are recognized and supported.

Teacher solutions:

·         View teachers as experts and support the professional development needed so that teachers can effectively lead schools.

·         Create professional learning communities within and between schools and the community so that teachers are facilitating and modeling the collaboration necessary to life-long learning.

 

Behind Closed Doors

Two events which are instructive for great education policy hit the media in a big way in the last week.  The first was the debut of the infamous talking pineapple; the second was when New Jersey single dad Stu Chaifetz planted a recording device on his ten year old autistic son and captured a day’s worth of abusive and inappropriate behavior on the part of several of the adults in his son’s self contained autism classroom.

What did both of these events have in common?  They were the product of things that go on behind closed doors.  They are worst case scenarios, examples of what can happen when transparency is abandoned for long periods of time, and people run amok.

The irony of the talking pineapple is that these were the sort of divergent questions we want to have in our classroom bag of tricks.  Many questions in real life have no correct answer, and there is a useful place in education for introducing that incontrovertible fact to students.  That place, however, is most certainly not a bubble test, which measures convergent thinking.  

No, encouraging divergent thinking requires discussion, something that New York State teachers are forbidden with respect to this test.  Had there been some transparency around this test, had it been vetted by real teachers, if test items did not have to hide behind a veil of secrecy, somebody might have flagged this idiocy.  The silver lining here is that maybe the talking pineapple will increase public skepticism about high stakes testing.

Testing companies like secrecy because it allows them to recycle items, keeping costs down and profits up.  We are, however, in an era where tests can destroy people’s careers and hurt children.  Therefore good and fair public policy demands transparency.  We cannot use discredited instruments to hire and fire, to award “merit” pay, or close neighborhood schools.  The public interest here is at odds with the interests of for-profit  testing industry, and the quasi-public education policy apparatus which feeds off it.

The case of little Akian Chaifetz calls for a different type of transparency.  As I listened in horror to the aggrieved Dad, and to the excerpts of child abuse one thing became abundantly clear to me.  Nobody was supervising these people.  The door of that classroom was never being opened.  They were in private practice and they had absolutely no idea what they were doing.  The evidence points to this going on for years, so long that abusive, inappropriate adult behavior had become the cultural norm in that classroom.

In the 21^st century, teaching is a team sport.  Had that classroom door been open, had some knowledgeable supervisor or colleague learned early on that these people were clueless, maybe they could have gotten some training, or maybe they could have been encouraged to find a different line of work.  This is not to excuse bad behavior; it is to point out the tragedy that a dad had to wire his kid to achieve the sort of transparency which millions of parents assume when they send their children to school in the morning.  This is why we have administrators and instructional coaches.  Ultimately this was an institutional failure.

Let these be cautionary tales for the education policy world.

On the one hand, the closed door meeting is a lubricant for decision making.  It allows you to get things done.  The messiness involved in transparency can be inefficient.  That conference room meeting can also leverage expertise, allowing policy experts to deploy their knowledge without having to bring novices up to speed.  People can say things in these meetings and make decisions in the relative safety of privacy which can be genuinely useful.

On the other hand, closed doors are inherently undemocratic and elitist.  They carry the assumption that the public is too stupid to participate in public policy.  They create echo chambers and encourage group think, which makes smart people stupid.  Faulty assumptions go unchallenged, and elaborate policy structures are built on sand.  Key stakeholders can be left out, leading to needless conflict when policy is rammed down the throats of those not invited to the table.

The world of education policy is a murky revolving-door world of government agencies, private contractors, foundations, academia and unions, among others.  Sometimes it rides off the rails, like Akian’s teachers, in Jonah Edelman meltdown moments and Wisconsin-style bolt-out-of-the-blue attacks. 

The question of the balance of transparency and closed doors is a divergent question, very much like those about our talking pineapple.  There is no absolute answer.  There is always a trade-off between the benefits of efficiency, and the capacity of transparency to preserve and promote the public good.  Given the choice, I would tend to err on the side of transparency.  You can always fall back on the truth.

Common Core and Monkey Training

Wrote this before the RTT convening in Boston.  This is where I was - I will write more on this subject  with respect to the convening in the future.

I teach elementary music.  I’ll be touched more tangentially by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) than many teachers, but I do have wide experience thinking about and writing curriculum with reference to standards in both my endorsement areas, music and technology integration.  I don’t have to implement CCSS in my classroom at this point, but as an educator, I'm fascinated. 

The problem with grappling with the details of implementation is that it is important to be able to articulate the big picture, the broad principles which form the basis of the CCSS.  The big picture is helpful both to educators and administrators trying to get a purchase on how to begin the work of CCSS, and to parents and other stakeholders trying to understand the implications for students. 

Standards represent our aspirations for students, which then need to be interpreted through a rich matrix of curricula, increasingly fine grained plans for the delivery of instruction.  There many different types of curricula, such as the political curriculum, the district/building curriculum, the classroom curriculum, the shelf curriculum, the taught curriculum and the learned curriculum, all of which look very different.

I've come to the conclusion that the most important curriculum is the one that the teacher has internalized, enabling minute to minute decisions in work with actual students.  All of those other types just prepare the one that lives in the teacher's head.  In the heat of the moment we can't pull a binder off the shelf to make decisions; we need an internalized plan to guide appropriate instruction.

Hence the significance of the broad outline or principles.

·         The CCSS calls for fewer things taught in greater depth.

·         The CCSS puts greater emphasis on informational texts, which is a type of reading we use in real life.

·         CCSS calls for more persuasive writing and less personal narrative, again what we do in real life.

·         CCSS calls for an emphasis on higher order thinking skills, requiring new assessments that can actually capture them.

·         In math, CCSS calls for the ability to reason quantitatively, not just the ability to perform procedures.

·         CCSS aspires to have students be able to anticipate the next steps in their learning, and therefore be educational actors rather than passive recipients.

·         CCSS calls for higher order thinking skills (HOTS).

I'm interested in the potential applicability of broad principles of this sort in my discipline, music.  My Orff Schulwerk level III movement teacher Brian Burnett talks about how we make kids in into "trained monkeys" in music classes.  By the same token, math students who perform the steps of a procedure but can't ascertain whether their answer is within an order of magnitude of reality are also victims of monkey training.  I ask myself what a Common Core for music might look like.

I'm fond of giving carefully scaffolded composition/improvisation tasks to students as a means of assessment.  A couple of years ago I had a fourth grade class improvise pitches to the rhythm of a poem using their recorders.  The parameters I set were a Do pentatonic scale on G, using G as the home tone.  One of the students asked me if he could use an F.  I replied, "Convince me."  He proceeded to improvise a lovely piece in the Dorian mode, dutifully ending it on G, per the requirements of the assignment.  When he shared with the class, I asked him if there was a note that would be more suitable for the ending than G.  He paused and thought about it, listening inside his head, and replied "D".  I looked at him and said, "You understand the home tone."

Martin deployed judgment in his answer.  My only regret was that in the design of the task I had not provided easier avenues of deploying judgment - I guess we call that reflection.  In fact the other day I gave this same task to students again, but this time invited them to choose their own home tone from given pitch set, which most did quite effectively. 

Could this story be illustrative of how the broad principles of our Common Core aspirations could be appropriately deployed in non-tested subjects?  A rising sea lifting all boats....

Innovation, Ideology and Compliance

As we say in the union: a supposal....

Let’s set aside for a moment the heated arguments about the course of federal education policy. Let’s give the United States Department of Education (ED) the benefit of the doubt, impute good intentions, and take at face value their claim that they are trying to use federal policy to change the conversation about teacher quality from sorting and firing, to elevating the profession and improving teaching practice.  We can always revert to the noisy argument, but stepping back to a quieter place for a moment may illuminate  avenues for better policy.

Race to the Top and NCLB waivers are among an alphabet soup of ED initiatives intended to spur change and innovation at a state level.  Certainly there is guidance from ED as to what that change might look like, and that is legitimately a subject for political debate.  Let’s consider the possibility that to some significant extent these programs are intended less to be prescriptive, and more to be platforms for innovation.

There is a dangerous assumption embedded in policy of this sort: that states have the same capacity for creativity and innovation as the people who created the policy in the first place.  There may be states where capacity exists, but in many places this policy ship is dashed on the twin rocks of ideology and compliance.

Ideology is expressed in astroturf teacher bashing, and in policy and legislation that assume that bad teachers and the unions that protect them are the problem.  This is the “fire your way to the top” approach, which has the added advantage allowing politicians to evade the tough task of raising the revenue necessary to create a great education system.  From the left it consists of a cynical view that everything ED does is astroturf in disguise.  Ideology offers its proponents relief from the necessity of thinking.

When it comes to trying to elevate the teaching profession to advance the cause of great student learning in our schools, ideology is a noisy, destructive distraction from that task.  Federal programs designed to encourage creativity and innovation cannot succeed in states where this type of toxic thinking predominates. 

There is a second, more insidious impediment to the success of current federal policy: a compliance mentality.  State and district level bureaucrats often live in a culture of compliance.  Rather than using a program as an opportunity to create something progressive, they ask “What is the minimum we have to do to get the money/waiver/whatever?”  This mentality collides with the intent of the people who created the Federal policy.  That policy is designed to disrupt and change the status quo.  Compliance is about maintaining a comfortable status quo for adults, regardless of the impact that has on the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.

There are places that have managed to keep the ideologues tamped down while responding with some creativity to federal initiatives.  Massachusetts is one such place.  The Massachusetts Teachers Association took a proactive approach to the RTT requirement to incorporate student achievement data in the new teacher evaluation system.  The MTA plan, which the Association characterizes as a “Triangulated Standards-based Evaluation Framework,” uses student achievement as one data point among several. 

The universities and think tanks in Massachusetts have the ability to help by providing a theoretical framework to support the work in strategic partnerships with other stakeholders.  Few states boast such capacity - certainly not my state, Vermont.

There is a pathway for more effective Federal policy.  Presuming good intentions here, if it is the intent to promote innovation rather than ideology or compliance, ED has to consider ways of building capacity in places where it does not currently exist, ways of getting colleges and universities to step up to the plate, of helping unions get past a circle the wagons mentality, of reaching people of good will and helping them to understand the issues at hand, not just in states that are the recipients of federal largess, but everywhere.

People who are numbed by the noise of worthless ideology, or deadened by the dull drone of bureaucratic compliance, cannot be the engines of innovation, cannot be equals and partners in a program of educational improvement. 

How can we move past the ideological noise of both the right and the left, and emerge from the suffocation of compliance in order to create great public policy?  How can we learn to govern ourselves again?

Collaboration: Just a Fancy Word for Working Together

I remember seeing Jesse Jackson on TV many years ago.   He said something about language which has always stuck with me, “Don’t say ‘prevaricate’ when what you mean is ‘lie’.”  What he was getting at is the virtue of simplicity and directness in the choice of words.

The word collaborate has been all the rage in education, whether we are designing “collaboration time” among teachers at a school, or achieving “labor-management collaboration” between boards, unions and administrators.  It’s easy to lose track, when using a fancy term like collaboration, of the human dimension of collaboration, in all its simplicity and directness: people working together towards a common goal.

In education, there is only one goal that matters: great student learning.  All other subsidiary goals must be paths to that single thing.  Without that, you can collaborate all you want, but the result will be vestigial.  Probably not a good use of anybody’s time.

In my experience there are two paths to labor-management collaboration, meaning leaders working together to advance student learning, 

The first is charismatic individuals.  There are extraordinary people out there who “get it” and can draw others into a home cooked approach to working together that works tolerably well.  But there are three disadvantages to relying on charismatic leadership:

1.       There aren’t enough charismatic leaders

2.       Charismatic leaders retire

3.       Charismatic leaders can block the development of other leaders

The second approach is to create collaborative structures and techniques within which normal people can operate.  The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is in the business of promoting this body of knowledge.  Techniques include Interest Based Bargaining (IBB), labor-management committees, contract language which permits flexibility at the site level, and salary benchmarking.

I’ll use IBB for a moment, because it is probably the best known (if most misunderstood) technique.  IBB is not a panacea.  Rather, it provides a civil platform upon which other types of work can occur.  It is virtually impossible to advance the cause of student learning when, as one of our veteran WCEA negotiators put it, “The two sides are shouting at each other through their spokespersons.”

Luckily IBB has a well articulated body of theory and practice, which makes it accessible to those of us who are mere mortals.  People can learn to do this – it’s not a matter of talent.

The danger of this sort of structure is that it will ossify into something ritualistic, that people will value the process itself more than overall end goal of the enterprise.  But, providing this detour can be avoided with a little “big picture” thinking (something that seems to annoy a lot of folks when pulling weeds) having a structure for ongoing conversations about local policy and progressive education reform creates sustainability.

Of course the ideal would be to have both the charismatic leadership and sustainability of structures to support meaningful reform.  But if I had to choose, I’d choose sustainability.  This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon.  And there is an essential human dimension to the work which is not captured by a term like collaboration.  Let’s remember, as flawed human beings, the advantage of structures that support us in working together.

Responsibilty, Autonomy, and Reform - NEA Style

I was invited by Larry Ferlazzo to comment on his Ed Week blog Classroom Q&A on “Transforming Teaching” along with Dennis Van Roekel and Renee Moore. Here are my remarks; I urge folks to read the original.

In "Transforming Teaching," the NEA recognized one incontrovertible fact: you cannot coerce reform. There is reform done to teachers (we've seen a lot of that lately), reform done by teachers (think NBPTS, CTQ or TURN), and reform done with teachers. "Transforming Teaching" calls for the latter: deep organic reform rising from within the profession with meaningful and realistic cooperation from other stakeholders.

Good reform is ultimately about changing teaching practice in order to achieve better student learning. Without the full force and participation of the teaching profession this simply cannot be done.

A couple of settlements ago, our school board demanded and got a 7.5 minimum hour day. Administration immediately designated that the time before and after school as "collaboration time" and created uniform start and end times at all schools. In my school there was widespread resentment over what one teacher called "forced collaboration." People watched the clock. The minimum became the maximum. The scheme backfired, producing far less collaboration than might have occurred by creating a great climate where people want to stay and collaborate because they love their jobs.

This story illustrates principles of human psychology and group dynamics. Multiply that by three million, the size of the teaching profession in the United States. You can't do it to us, as satisfying as that might seem at times; you have to do it with us.

The NEA recognized the psychology of the teaching profession by forming the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, a group of master teachers charged, among other things, to tell NEA a few things it did not want to hear. What emerged is a picture of systemic reform by and for teachers to elevate teaching into a true profession.

"Transforming Teaching" calls for real reform by demanding the conditions that create great teachers: professional responsibility and collaborative autonomy. Notice that I said responsibility. Much has been made lately of that fact that there is no word in the Finnish language for accountability in the sense that we use it in American education. If we aspire to the level of the best performing systems we need to embrace an essential principle that drives these systems: collective responsibility.

Yes, "Transforming Teaching" makes demands on other stakeholders: on the unions and their professional staffs, on the US Department of Education, on legislatures, and on school districts. But read the document closely - given professional responsibility, we teachers are far harder on ourselves than any outside entity. Why? Because we work for and with kids and our lives are better when their lives are better. Teachers live reform and are the ones who must ultimately create it.

"Entrenched Job Security"

A friend of mine recently wrote:

"For other contexts, staying in the classroom may the best option- teaching has lots of perks that are often underappreciated- relative stability when compared to other job options based on education/experience, shorter work year, decent benefits, and again- entrenched job security despite what many actually perceive...."

"Entrenched job security" is a necessary feature of the sort of deferred compensation schemes historically employed in civil service.  What "entrenched job security" really means is robust due process, i.e. one can only be fired for just cause related to actual performance, not because you are the wrong race, you didn't give the school board chair's daughter an A, a younger teacher would be cheaper, or the superintendent's niece needs a job.  I am willing to talk about ways that due process has become too robust, but I strongly believe that due process and seniority protections are absolutely necessary corollaries of the single salary schedule.

As I've written before, we have a system that provides civil servants with the greatest rewards in terms of top level salaries and dignified pensions in exchange for longevity.  There's a whole raft of assumptions built into this system, but in the final analysis, it is what it is.  Unless you have a reasonable expectation that you can make it to retirement in your chosen profession, a single salary schedule is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Another historical thing to remember is that government employees and their unions have tended to opt for pensions and benefits at the expense of salaries.  If these seem generous, it is because we have paid for them with cold hard cash.

In the current environment it would be a lot safer to take the cash up front.  We are governed by a kleptocracy that is seeking to steal the deferred compensation not only of teachers, but of all manner of government workers.  Our due process rights, pensions and benefits (thanks to our unions - not just NEA and AFT but all public sector unions) are a slap in the face to private industry, and create pressure for decent treatment for all workers.  Very inconvenient for the 1%....

To be clear, I am not a fan of the single salary schedule, and it's accompanying arrangements. I would prefer to explore different compensation methods.  The political/economic problem is that these methods would accelerate payment of wages and benefits from the future to the present.  Let's face it - it's far cheaper to be unfair to people, to get rid of expensive employees, and to steal their deferred compensation, than it would be to create rational strategic compensation plans that pay people today for the work they do today.

The recent release of test data in NYC is part of an ongoing effort to flush the system of mid-end career educators.  People are not excrement; they should never be flushed.  We must be offended when people are treated this way, not because we are fellow teachers, but because we are fellow human beings.  Even if we were not teachers, I would claim we would have a moral obligation to be offended by what is at best basic unfairness and at worst criminal contempt for human beings.

Teacher compensation is not bunch of "perks" and rights that other people do not have.  That plays right into the so-called "reform" narrative playing out in Indiana, Wisconsin, NYC, etc.  Rather, we have earned these things.  Want to talk about other ways of doing business Mr. Politician?  I'm all ears.  But we're not going to fund it through wholesale theft.  Crime is un-American - at least in the America I aspire to.

Vermont and NCLB Waivers: Student Learning or Power Politics?

In order to understand the Vermont NCLB waiver application you have to understand the waiver process itself.  An op ed in the Times Argus recently critiqued certain features of the state’s application, including emphasis on high stakes testing, and failure to address poverty as a factor in low student achievement, but the waiver process is a Federal policy of the United States Department of Education.

To understand waivers you also have to take into account the power dynamics in Washington.  There is an ongoing effort by Congressional Republicans to block virtually every Obama administration initiative.  The Republicans strive to deny the administration a signature domestic policy achievement during an election year, even though an Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization has been the first term hallmark of virtually every administration since LBJ.  The last re-authorization happened in 2001 during the Bush administration.  We know this iteration as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

I believe the Obama administration put ESEA on the back burner for a variety of valid reasons.  There was the possibility of bipartisanship.  They expended political capital on fixing the economy, on wars, on health insurance reform, and embedded a major education policy initiative in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Race to the Top (RTT).  RTT was a highly successful competitive grant program which leveraged states to make wholesale education policy changes at a very modest cost – just four billion dollars. 

Against the background of severe revenue problems in almost every state, RTT moved policy in significant ways even in states that did not receive grants.  For example, Vermont’s State Board of Education adopted Common Core Standards along with 45 other states and joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop a new generation of tests for Common Core.  But we did not even apply for RTT.  The results of RTT were well nigh astonishing.  Seldom has so much change been achieved for so little federal money.

NCLB waivers are a continuation of RTT.  There is enough similarity between the requirements of the two programs to make this assertion.  For example, the adoption of College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core meets this requirement) and the adoption of new teacher accountability systems that take into account test scores in some way are salient features of both programs.  So Vermont’s waiver application makes perfect sense – these are requirements for a waiver.  If you don’t meet the requirements, you don’t get a waiver.

The difference between the programs is rather than dangling cash in front of revenue starved states like RTT, the waiver program dangles regulatory relief from the NCLB ticking time bomb of 100% student proficiency on tests by 2014, a statistical impossibility that will label virtually every school as failing and subject them to a draconian set of restructuring requirements, including firing their teachers and their administrators.

In essence, the Obama/Duncan administration is doing a political end run around a recalcitrant and uncooperative Congress.  In my view, the whole thing has a lot more to do with Washington power politics and whole lot less to do with student learning.  If states adopt the basic tenets of the “Blueprint”, the Obama/Duncan plan for ESEA reauthorization, wholesale via RTT and waivers, then the ESEA becomes moot, and the administration has won the political battle for education reform without firing a shot. An ESEA reauthorization, if it occurs, will merely be codification of changes led at the state level.   It is an audacious political strategy.

Why is student learning jeopardized in this scenario?  Waivers assume that all states have a similar capacity to assimilate these policies.  I found it interesting that states like Massachusetts and Colorado already have waivers in hand.  The former was a round 2 RTT state that has a huge jumpstart on the work.  The latter is a state noted for pioneering many of the innovations that are becoming embedded in Federal education policy.  In Vermont we are starting from scratch.  Ten years of slash and burn budgeting during the Douglas administration have reduced our DOE to a shell of its former self, a compliance agency for Federal formula grants.  Whatever little capacity to respond to national policy is left is embedded in outside organizations like VT-NEA.

We are left asking permission.  Instead of treating the waiver process as an opportunity to rethink systems, we treat the waiver application like a bunch of hoops to jump through - hardly a way to make effective policy.  And student learning is left out of the equation.

The great danger here is that our legislature will panic and do something nonsensical, like New York or Tennessee did around teacher evaluation.  Our legislature has a history of doing that sort of thing at the eleventh hour – things like the “two vote mandate.”  I hope instead that our leaders think about how to bring together people with interest and expertise in great education policy to rebuild Vermont’s capacity so that we can not only respond effectively to the national policy context, but learn to lead it.