The nice thing about these ventures is that they “own” their reforms and are solely committed to executing them–not to meeting every need of every child in a given geography. The 21st century “system” may well be a spider web or latticework of these.

The key here is that the ‘innovative ‘ 21st century reform being advocated by the oligarchs and dutifully promoted by their useful tools is just the latest incarnation of separate but equal. And, like its predecessor, the 21st century version of separate but equal is anything but equal.

What follows is a simple example of the pundit shuffle in action.

Step 1) One think tank hack with zero experience or specialized training in education uses a research article identifying a need in Pre-K education for a broader “range of professional development activities and supports targeted toward teachers’ interactions with children” to publish a thinly veiled advertisement for a Pre-K standardized assessment “product” designed to measure the effectiveness of Pre-school programs.

Step 2) Communicate Cognitive Tag: We need better/more Pre-K assessment.

Step 3) Second think tank hack with zero experience or specialized training in education links to previous hack quoting the exact paragraph that introduces the new “product”.

Step 4) Communicate Cognitive Tag: We need better/more Pre-K assessment.

Step 5) Third think tank hack with zero experience or specialized training in education links to the first hack referencing the new “product”.

Step 6) Communicate Cognitive Tag: We need better/more Pre-K assessment.

Step 7) Profit… in the sense that a common sense idea has been introduced into public discourse via a traditional media outlet and has gained some modicrum of epistemic validity by being referenced by other “bloggers” AND [whether by design or simple 'peer effects'] a new “product” has been introduced to the very narrow demographic of individuals who read Education Week and follow issues related to education policy.

This is how “common sense” is constructed in the 21st century. It is not unique to education and schooling as it is operative across the political landscape from taxes to “entitlement reform”, and it is one of the ways in which our flailing democracy is being purchased. [Cue the Lee Greenwood music - Montage of happy children and the elderly in front of flowing American flags - Fade to black]

One of the key players in the distribution of Waiting for ‘Superman’ is Walden Media, a film company owned by Philip Anschutz.  Barbara Miner touches on him (and many other players) in her recent article, but I’ve yet to see anyone look at how Anschutz uses his family’s foundation to push a conservative/libertarian agenda.

As I’ll lay out below, the Anschutz Foundation, chaired and financed by Philip, is quite fond of some of the biggest players in conservative education advocacy: the Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute.  The foundation also gives to the Freedom Works Foundation, Washington Legal Foundation, and various other influential think tanks/organizations.  I won’t really get into it here, but it’s fair to say this foundation uses their philanthropic arm much the way the Koch brothers do: to further their own conservative agenda while creating a climate that is more friendly for their businesses.

Let’s review.  It is now commonly accepted among mainstream elites — from Oprah to Matt Lauer to Arne Duncan — that simply pouring more money into the public school system will not produce the results we want.  It is now commonly accepted that the teacher unions have been a significant barrier to school improvement by protecting ineffective teachers and opposing meaningful reforms.  It is now commonly accepted that parents should have a say in where their children go to school and this choice will push traditional public schools to improve.  It is now commonly accepted that we have to address the incentives in the school system to recruit, retain, and motivate the best educators…

These reform ideas were barely a twinkle in Ronald Reagan’s eye three decades ago and are now broadly accepted across both parties and across the ideological spectrum.  This is a huge accomplishment and rather than being all bummed out that everyone else now likes the band that I thought was cool before anyone ever heard of it, we should be amazed at how much good music there is out there.

Yep… All of these ideas have become “commonly accepted” without an empirical foundation demonstrating that they are effective in achieving the goals of public education. However, knowing this offers very little by way of comfort. I can take no solace in knowing that madness has achieved hegemonic dominance.

Former first lady Laura W. Bush announced a new nationwide initiative today aimed at changing the way America’s principals are recruited and prepared—and how they run schools.

Mrs. Bush’s announcement at a high school here marks the first major effort of the nonpartisan George W. Bush Institute, located at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. The institute’s newly formed Alliance to Reform Education Leadership will work toward the goal of giving teachers what they say they need most—great principals.

“Strong leaders create a cascading effect of success,” she said. “To succeed, we need exceptional leaders in every school district as the rule, not the exception.” [...]

The alliance between business schools and education leaders is not without precedent. Harvard University has run its Public Education Leadership Project through a partnership between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education for many years, and the university launched a new education leadership doctorate this fall that gives students cross-disciplinary training from the business and education schools, as well as Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which focuses on public policy and service.

The Bush Institute will serve as a convener of the various consortiums and make available online modules of education leadership content to help fill in the gaps the business school partners may have.

Oh boy… now we have yet another “non-partisan institute” to help the nation along on its journey to Banana Republic status. GW is the gift that just keeps on giving.

The other point that I would make relates to the construction of political power. What you’re seeing here is a staggering degree of media penetration by individuals who have no special training or experience in education and schooling. Not only do they provide rich material for the blogosphere but these same individuals provide expert opinion for all manner of reporting on education policy across many platforms. In fact, that is one of the primary purposes of the modern think-tank! Think-tanks don’t “think”; they get the message out.

As for the Mead post… she’s building on Hess’ excretable post dismissing the Point study with a recommendation for more “standardized, reliable, and validated observational measures of teacher behavior”. I bet you can guess where that’s leading us. To be sure, this is the next battle to be fought in the war to relegate schooling to the cognitive basement.

If you want to do something through a bonus/incentive mechanism, what would make sense is to offer teachers extra money to take on challenging assignments in high poverty schools.

The point is that an absolutely flat salary structure makes no sense. Instead, we prefer to rely on proxies for quality. Currently, we use length of service and possession of a master’s degree as our proxies. But the evidence suggests that these are bad proxies and that value-added metrics, despite their flaws, are better.

Ahhh… Nothing like the smell of dogmatic assertions in the morning! Let’s start with assumption numero uno: incentive structures must be centered around financial compensation. As I’ve pointed out previously, the most powerful incentive mechanism for the ‘professions’ is not related to monetary rewards. Instead, the research tells us that the best way to motivate professionals dealing with complexity in the workplace is to provide them with the opportunity to exercise their professional autonomy whenever possible and to foster a sense of purpose within the organization or institution. In fact, monetary rewards actually work to undermine performance in complex tasks.

Assumption numero dos: value-added metrics provide a relatively accurate measure of teacher performance. The idea that value-added metrics are the best methods we currently have for measuring teacher performance has become commonsensical among both policy elites and the average “man on the street”. I mean its scientific! Right?! No, as the National Research Council pointed out, it is not. Simply put, excluding the majority of phenomena impacting student performance on standardized assessments in order to offer up quantifiable metrics is most certainly un-scientific. Yet, that is exactly what Yglesias and the edu-philanthropists that pay his salary are telling us we should do. Of course, he offers us nothing to back that up. It’s just “true”… right Matt? Glad to see that philosophy degree from Harvard is paying off for ya…

So, when I saw this blog post over at EdWeek yesterday, I took notice…

Tomorrow, Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives will publish the Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) study, reporting the results of a major three-year teacher pay experiment in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. The study examines the effect of merit pay for middle school math teachers who were eligible for bonuses of up to $15,000 per year based on student test score gains.

The study will, unfortunately, tell us nothing of value…

There are two schools of thought when making the case for performance pay.

The first is the Skinnerian conviction that paying people to raise test scores will lead them to work “harder.” This presupposes that the kinds of cash-for-sales bonuses used to incent encyclopedia salesmen in the 1950s are a way to improve teacher performance. If the test bounce is big, it won’t strengthen my faith in performance pay one iota. After all, positive results may well simply reflect that the math teachers in question shifted their time and energy from other tasks to tested material. And, should the results be negative, it may simply reflect that teachers don’t respond to cash bonuses like rats do to food pellets. That wouldn’t diminish my confidence that it’s good for schooling if teacher pay better reflects teacher contributions.

The second school of thought, and the one that interests serious people, is the proposition that rethinking teacher pay can help us reshape the profession to make it more attractive to talented candidates, more adept at using specialization, more rewarding for accomplished professionals, and a better fit for the twenty-first century labor force. And, whether or not bonuses linked to test scores had any effect on measured achievement tells me absolutely nothing on this score.

Whether the merit pay experiment shows big test jumps or none at all, it won’t tell us a damn thing about the ability of performance pay to attract new talent to teaching, undergird efforts to promote professionalism, retain talent, or boost regard for the profession–much less how to craft systems that will do any of this.

For a fella who has long championed “evidenced-based” policies he sure doesn’t seem to be very fired up about an experiment using randomized field trials. Perhaps, this is because Dr. Hess is familiar with the large body of evidence demonstrating that financial rewards are ineffective motivators for complex professions such as teaching and that instead creating a space for individuals to exercise their professional autonomy reaps huge rewards. Of course, if that were the case, it would be difficult for him to reconcile his unmitigated support for the de-professionalization of teaching with this understanding. Or, maybe he had a heads-up on the results before hand and wanted to make a preemptive strike to mitigate any potential damage to the reforms he so dearly loves. Either way, the results of the POINT study are not surprising.

“We tested the most basic and foundational question related to performance incentives — Does bonus pay alone improve student outcomes? – and we found that it does not,” Matthew Springer, executive director of the National Center on Performance Incentives, said. “These findings should raise the level of the debate to test more nuanced solutions, many of which are being implemented now across the country, to reform teacher compensation and improve student achievement.”

Shocker. I wonder if anybody has passed along the bad news to Oprah, Gates and Rhee?

All snark aside, I would have to say that, like Dr. Hess, I don’t really put a lot of stock in any one study, but I would say that there is a lesson to be learned here. That lesson is twofold: The U.S. has a long history of miracle cures and quick fixes for public schooling that inevitably turn out to be an illusion being peddled by hucksters with bigger ambitions in mind, and those hucksters will inevitably couch the snake oil they’re peddling in that time honored expression that masks the exercise of power in modern society… Common Sense.

[UPDATE] Looks like there are others who share my suspicion that the good Dr. Hess knew what the report would say before its release. [h/t]

Driving the establishment of teacher-run schools is the idea that teachers who have a sense of ownership of their schools will be happier and more motivated.

But some educators and parents question whether such schools are the solution for urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students and struggle with low test scores and discipline problems.

They say that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the inner workings of a school, like paying bills, conducting fire drills and refereeing faculty disputes.

“Ever try to plan a vacation with a large extended family? That’s what it’s going to be like,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “It’s a good idea in theory, but there are just a handful of teachers who can pull it off.”

The Fordham Foundation is one of the biggest funders of educational hacks such as Terry Moe and Caroline Hoxby who never met a school choice or charter proposal they wouldn’t shill for using the language of experimentation and innovation. Yet, without a shred of evidence, Petrilli is dismissing just the kind of experimentation that his organization supposedly advocates. What gives? Of course, the answer is that the Fordham foundation isn’t interested in a dynamic education sector as much as it is interested in a privatized education sector in which private interests tap public funds for private profit. What this one little quote offers us is a peek behind the current of rhetoric employed by today’s intrepid reformers and what we find there is avarice and greed… not a concern for education.

What is its basic conception of assessment?

What is its goal?

Does it reduce everything to numbers?

Is it about “doing to” or “working with”?

Is its priority to support kids’ interest?

Does it avoid excessive assessment?

Note Kohn’s last point… “excessive assessment”. It is obvious here and elsewhere in Kohn’s work that he is not against assessment in all forms, just those forms of standardized assessment that kills curiosity and discovery in education and reduces the goals of schooling to the cognitive basement. However, for those whose pay check is dependent on organizations pushing these kind of assessment-based curricula, this outrage must not stand. So, how does Tucker respond?

There’s a real need for healthy skepticism around our nation’s quest to collect and utilize education data to improve and deepen student learning. Complex formulas, such as those used to calculate value-added scores for teachers, need to be open to examination, testing, and improvement over time. Policymakers and educators need to better understand how to interpret and use assessment data, both from statewide summative tests and their own classroom activities. And we need smart policies, practitioners, and even skeptics to help us use better information about student learning to its full potential.

But there’s a big difference between healthy skepticism and denial. Alfie Kohn, writing in Education Week, sits firmly in denial.

If you follow the link offered by Tucker, he is attempting to tar Kohn by linking him to climate change deniers! That’s right… If you do not accept reductive quantitative measures of academic performance that are not very good at doing the job for which they are being used [1][2][3][4], then you are a “Data Denier” akin to the anti-science global climate change deniers. Neat trick, right?