It’s a hotbed of school reformers!  The RMN takes a look at a milestone happening in Colorado and the leadership roles that Peter Groff and Terrance Carroll will have there when the legislature gets going this session.   Both these guys have been involved in education reform for a while and have led important educational efforts in the legislature there.  

Denver school superintendent Michael Bennet will be appointed (rather his appointment will be announced, natch) to the U.S. Senate tomorrow to fill out the term of Senator Salazar who is joining the Obama Administration as Secretary of the Interior.  Bennet is one of the most thoughtful and effective school superintendents on the scene today.   

One anecdote that says a lot:   When you visit schools with him in Denver and drop in on classrooms the students tend to know his name and recognize him, and Denver is not a small school district with just a few schools.

Not since Strom Thurmond dined…?  In the trivia department, I think the last school superintendent to serve in the Senate was Strom Thurmond.   If that’s wrong someone please correct in the comments. 

Multiple Intelligences: Although given his current job the education angle is getting the attention (I’m guilty, too, just look at the title of this post), in fact Bennet has worked successfully in several public and private venues, he’s an impressive guy.   But, there are obviously high hopes he’ll be a reformer in national office given his track record on the education issue.

Don’t believe everything you read:  This AP story from a few weeks ago has a misleading top - implying that Bennet modified Denver’s differentiated teacher pay plan to increase teacher support - that seems to now be framing some of the bloggy and other reax and coverage of the Bennet story.  In fact, the issue on teacher pay was a long-term redistribution of salaries from some veterans toward newbies that was highly contentious at the time and where Bennet ultimately prevailed by hanging tough under pressure.  More here and here.   It’s true that in the end more teachers voted for the most recent contract than the original pay plan, which is good but more complicated than AP  lets on.

Julie Corbett is with Mass Insight Education in Massachusetts, they’re the folks who put out the big turnaround report last year.  Turns out her sister, Rachel Corbett, is an artist with trout as her muse.  This is her holiday card from this year, one of several she does using various trout (or salmonids for the sticklers).

Happy New Year.

The Rose Bowl already looks like the most interesting match-up of the day tomorrow, but here’s one more reason to watch it:  LA charter school network ICEF will be featured at halftime.  Some background here and here on their work.  Of course, you also don’t want to miss the Cotton Bowl…

In The Times Matt Miller resurrects an old idea - revenue sharing - with a new twist, tying big increases in the federal share of education spending to differentiated pay for teachers.  Matt’s onto something here - the heavy reliance on localized funding for schools is unfair to poor communities, more federal money should include some reciprocal obligations for states, and more money for human capital reforms is an important idea.   But, human capital reform likely can be leveraged for less than the sums Matt is discussing (pdf). 

Instead, with the kind of money Matt is talking about Washington could exert even more leverage with an eye toward increasing productivity although perhaps in less sexy ways.   For example, a serious effort to put the federal government on track to meet its financial obligations under the federal special education law - IDEA -could be coupled with requirements to curb the over-identification of students for special education.    Federal aid could be tightly linked to even more robust efforts around data systems than we’re seeing today, especially in laggard states.  Perhaps you could even try for the national standards moonshot via more interstate collaboration or some derivative of it around enhanced benchmarking and transparency around standards and assessments.  These ideas need not, and should not, lead to a nationalizing of the school system but could be done in the context state flexibility under an umbrella of national goals and priorities.

Less clear given the politics as well as the radically decentralized state of education finance today, is whether revenue-sharing along these lines would actually lead to a net-reduction in spending or productivity reforms or just, as they say, make the pie higher.  That’s why tying reciprocal requirements to federal dollars is especially important - to make sure that, regardless, they are buying something.

The not-yet-passed stimulus bill is already creating jobs in our field.

Bob Herbert takes a look at AFT President Randi Weingarten’s recent speech as part of a column on American workers.   He writes that:

Ms. Weingarten was raising a cry against the demonizing of teachers and the widespread, uninformed tendency to cast wholesale blame on teachers for the myriad problems with American public schools. It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

But Ms. Weingarten’s defense of her members was not the most important part of the speech. The key point was her assertion that with schools in trouble and the economy in a state of near-collapse, she was willing to consider reforms that until now have been anathema to the union, including the way in which tenure is awarded, the manner in which teachers are assigned and merit pay.

Two thoughts.  First, I know a lot of people in this business and I don’t know anyone who casts wholesale blame on teachers for America’s educational woes.    On the contrary, there tends to be a lot of empathy for teachers who are too often stuck in lousy structural arrangements.   Perhaps Herbert is extrapolating from today’s emphasis on teacher effectiveness and human capital.  But saying teachers are the most important within school factor in student learning, and that public policy does not respect that today, is not the same as blaming them for today’s problems.   Second, in the context of the column, Weingarten’s efforts, if she can succeed, are key steps to help ensure that public schools - and their employees - don’t find themselves in the same jam the auto industry is in, namely a failure to change with the times.

Meanwhile, over at National Review  Mike Petrilli and Rick Hess attack President Bush over No Child Left Behind.   They caricuture the No Child law a bit, but the fundamental point is clear:  They don’t like all this achievement gap and civil rights oriented national policy.   The fight for the Republican soul on education policy is on.

Update:  Mike Petrilli thinks my ilk should be declaring victory…

Change in Command is a website that is posting views of various ideas types about the incoming Obama Administration and what it means.  Here’s my short take, somewhat reminiscent of this.  It’s about the podium and the purse and an honest conversation about problems like this.

It surely is true that where you stand depends on where you sit.

About every year now The Washington Post  runs a story about AP test taking in Montgomery County Public Schools, an affluent, though not exclusively so (about 25 percent free lunch overall), school district just outside of Washington, D.C. serving about 139,000 students.    To be sure Montgomery County has made admirable strides in increasing access to AP courses for more students especially low-income and minority students.  For instance the number of low-income students taking AP tests has increased from 160 to 1112 in the past eight years.   That should be commended and celebrated.  But, Montgomery County has proven to be at least as good at marketing (only the school board president, to her credit, offers a cautionary note in the press release) as they are at increasing AP course taking.   And The Post uncritically falls for it every time. 

Presumably keying off the county’s syrupy and context-free data presentation, the articles give scant treatment to the magnitude of the inequity that still exists and how much work remains to be done.  For example, while African-American students make up about 23 percent of Montgomery County’s high school population they account for only about six percent of the passed AP tests.  For Hispanic students the numbers are 19 percent and seven percent, respectively, and 19 percent and six percent for low-income students.   Meanwhile, other achievement gaps remain stubborn.   That’s why twice as many (6 to 3) Montgomery County high schools make the Washington Post/Newsweek “Challenge Index,” which is not achievement-gap sensitive than hit the board for U.S. News’  ranking of American high schools, which takes into account achievement gaps and AP test taking as well as passing.

Again, none of this is to denigrate the work that Montgomery County is doing here, they are national leaders on this issue.  Three high schools on the U.S. News list isn’t too shabby at all.  But the fact that they are leaders, even with those numbers, should be sobering news because of how far they still need to go and how grim the situation is nationally.  The Post story concludes by noting that only 1313 AP tests were passed by African-American students in New York City last year, a million student school system.    That’s true, and it’s shocking.   You have to think that if such a calamity were being visited on affluent white students it wouldn’t be buried at the very bottom of an article that itself overlooks the scale of the national challenge here.  It would be on the front page.  That is, after all, where they put the really important news like oral sex at affluent suburban middle schools…

The Asia Society has organized a group of groups to push for better international education using the competitiveness frame as a lever.  Good enough.   But, like “21st Century” skills it’s hard to find much in there that isn’t just a component of a good education.  And in terms of economic competitiveness giving that kind of education to students who don’t get it today (disproportionately low-income and minority students) seems like the most productive strategy and would radically increase civic equality and equity in this country at the same time.

Meanwhile, a big, and dare I say bold, new effort for common standards is underway with some noteworthy players involved.   It’s an important project so long as we remain alert to what educational challenges are indeed technocratic and which ones are political.  For instance, it’s hard to see the tremendous inequities in American education today as stemming from having the wrong standards or weak ones…

I’ve been getting a lot of emails wondering why nothing on the blog about the recent Washington Post package on D.C. charter schools.  Short answer:  I’ve been underwater with a few other projects.  

But, briefly, I found the first story too hot.  It looks like Tom Nida may not have been as careful as he should have been around fully disclosing all intersections of interest between his work and his D.C. charter board service.  However The Post’s treatment was, I thought, over the top because that doesn’t equate to self-dealing and unless that can clearly be shown this isn’t a conflict of interest story but rather a more complicated story about the confluences of interest that frequently arise around public markets and must be managed appropriately.  The second story was, on the other hand, too cold.   Sure, many charter schools are providing good public options for students in D.C. and helping leverage some broader changes in the city’s schools.  And, charters are unfairly maligned in D.C. and elsewhere.   But after that story a reader could be excused for not realizing that there are also some lousy charters in the city, too, and some messes that need cleaning up.   The story was too enthusiastic and they didn’t dig deep enough into the data.

So, all that is why I liked Saturday’s editorial on the whole thing.  It was just right.

Keeping with the football theme below, education and football fans want to be sure to watch the Cotton Bowl and its related events this year.  It’s steeped in history for Stefanie Sanford of the Gates Foundation and this year her grandmother is the grand marshal and will be honored during the game.

There has been a lot of chatter about Malcom Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article on hiring and talent.   Alternatively, people who know a lot about education or know a lot about football have weighed-in.   But fortunately there is a team out there that knows a lot about both.   That’s because while you may know good pieces of education reform trivia like which star school district reformer was also a star on “Punky Brewster” or who in the charter school world did a guest turn on “Friends,” did you know that teacher quality expert and The New Teacher Project President Tim Daly’s brother is Brendan Daly, an assistant coach for the Minnesota Vikings?

So, I asked them to pool their expertise and respond collectively to Gladwell’s piece.  A special thanks to Brendan, who incidentally is also a former high school teacher, for finding some time to help on this during the NFL season.

Their take is below:

The New Yorker recently published an article by Malcolm Gladwell arguing that in some professions, it is nearly impossible to tell on the front end which recruits will be successful. Gladwell’s primary examples are teachers and professional football quarterbacks. In recent years, similar arguments have been made by Michael Lewis in Moneyball about baseball players. For example, Lenny Dykstra was a perennial All-Star despite having only average physical gifts while his minor league roommate and future Oakland general manager, Billy Beane, failed to live up to expectations placed on him as a high school phenom.

Gladwell confirms what many educators and researchers already know: there is no highly reliable way to select teachers for effective performance without ever seeing them in the classroom first. That means we are unlikely to achieve our teacher quality goals through better screening alone. Nor will NFL teams find perfect quarterbacks through observations made at the league’s annual draft combine.

But there is more to the story. As Gladwell describes, some professions focus on responding to evidence of effectiveness on the job rather than predicting it up front. This can be an extremely effective approach, in part because those who show promise out of the gate tend to continue on that path, even if they were not among the top prospects initially.

For example, we have all heard fables of NFL quarterbacks drafted in the later rounds (or not at all) who went on to stardom. Tom Brady. Kurt Warner. Joe Montana. But in many cases, we knew those late round selections were something special as soon as they hit the field. Montana threw fifteen touchdowns and only nine interceptions in 1980, his first season as a regular starter for the 49ers. The next year, he led San Francisco to a Super Bowl victory. Kurt Warner was the league MVP and a Super Bowl winner in his very first season (1999) after going undrafted when he graduated from Northern Iowa (where he sat the bench until his senior year).

Luckily for fans, the NFL is highly sensitive to indications of performance. When a star player proves his worth, no ones cares any longer where he was drafted. The New England Patriots, having been pleasantly shocked by Tom Brady’s emergence as a star substitute for Drew Bledsoe in 2001, did not put Brady on the bench when Bledsoe returned from injury. Despite Bledsoe’s pedigree (#1 overall pick) and Brady’s lack thereof (#199 pick), it was immediately clear that Brady was destined to be the superior player. And Bledsoe was a three-time Pro Bowl selection in the prime of his career, not a washed up journeyman.

Researchers tell us that similar things are true of teachers. Outstanding teachers might come from high profile programs like Teach For America or The New Teacher Project… but they might also come from any number of other pipelines. If a teacher is among the top performers relative to other novices, he/she is likely to remain a top performer in future years. Just like Montana… and Warner… and Brady.

Professional football and teaching diverge when it comes to addressing unexpectedly poor performance. In the NFL, ineffective players have short careers, even when they are highly touted (and well compensated) draft picks. Cade McNown, the twelfth pick in the 1999 draft, was out of football after the 2002 season, having burned through three teams and having thrown fewer touchdowns than Brady threw in his first year as the starter for the Patriots.

Though there are certainly exceptions, education tends to work quite differently. Ineffective teaching is rarely addressed, despite evidence showing that it has a long term impact on kids. Principals are known to seek transfers for problematic teachers. They might even relegate their riskiest staff to grade levels where testing does not occur. Nonetheless, in almost all cases, the teacher continues to teach, too often with the same results.

It is hard to imagine being forced to watch thirteen seasons of Cade McNown misfiring in the NFL. He was ushered out quickly when it became clear he would never deliver. But what educator can’t point to a colleague who was permitted to continue at a low performance level year after year?

Why? Why does the NFL aggressively respond to evidence of performance while the teaching profession does not? The main reason lies with the decision-makers. Head coaches in the NFL are extraordinarily accountable for results. They are judged by the performance of the players they put on the field, and they cannot afford to risk losses by sticking with poor players for too long. A coach has every incentive to pull the plug as soon as it is clear that the second stringer is a better bet than the starter. As fans, we demand it.

In the NFL, results are very clear. Wins and losses tell the story. For individual players, there are numerous statistics that, although individually imperfect, create a collective portrait of effectiveness. Some may prioritize quarterback rating while others look for big plays or minimal interceptions. However, we can be fairly certain at the end of the day that almost everyone will find Peyton Manning preferable to Trent Edwards.

Which brings us back to education. What incentives confront principals when they make personnel decisions? Are they truly accountable for the results attained by their staff? For most of educational history, the answer has clearly been no. Principals could attribute student failure to poverty, home conditions, lack of financial resources, curriculum… take your pick. Addressing teacher performance is time consuming and frequently controversial. It involves difficult conversations, visiting classrooms regularly, and finding additional support. Too often, educators decide to look the other way. Teachers seldom receive meaningful, honest feedback on their work in the classroom. Subpar teachers are ignored during their probationary periods and worked around once they have tenure.

When it comes to measuring effectiveness, educators have trouble agreeing on which metrics should be used. There is doubt about whether individual contributions can be disentangled from those of colleagues. And beneath the surface, there is a tendency to blame families and society for student performance - the equivalent of the quarterback pointing to a porous offensive line. The result has been stagnation.

To improve American education, then, should we make it more like Gladwell’s description of the NFL? Should brutal honesty about performance rule the day, and should mediocrity result in a fast exit from the profession? Let’s be fair - every analogy has its limits. But increased accountability for results has the potential to compel action where passivity has ruled. Like head coaches, principals should put the best possible instructional teams in their classrooms. They must invest in them the way Bill Walsh invested in Joe Montana, analyzing his performance rigorously and pushing him to be outstanding, not merely good. The value of a teacher in supporting student performance is almost surely exceeds the value of a quarterback to a football team.

Like professional football, the education field should focus on responding affirmatively and swiftly to evidence of effectiveness on the job rather than seeking to predict effectiveness prior to entry and discounting everything that happens after that. Results matter, and we cannot continue to pretend that they do not.

It is true that in some cases, extra time and development make a difference. Brett Favre was a disaster with the Atlanta Falcons before becoming a Hall of Famer with the Packers. Steve Young took years to mature as a backup before emerging as a star with the 49ers (after pulling a Tom Brady maneuver on an aging Joe Montana, no less). But until these players earned their way onto the field, they sat.

If the NFL can set a standard for excellence, so can American schools. Just imagine if we took every classroom decision as seriously as the head coach takes the quarterback position. Parents and kids deserve no less.

–Guestbloggers Brendan and Tim Daly

Update:  More from Gladwell himself here and from former O-lineman Ezra Klein here.

Over at USN, Richard Whitmire sees Michelle Rhee in the paint…

There are serious and troubling gaps in incarceration rates by race and income (and education culpability there), but in the modern era it seems it’s Illinois governors who are most at-risk as a class…

You can see Mike Petrilli and me on The News Hour discussing the education landscape Secretary-designate Duncan is looking at.  And yes, on TV I often look like I’m being held hostage or am really mad.   I guess in a way the former is true, but not the latter.  Radio is a better medium for me.  So that’s why this audio version is the way to go….

Couple of interesting edujobs:  MDRC is looking for a new director of  their K-12 research department.  The Knowledge Alliance needs a policy manager (pdf).

It’s official (almost), Arne Duncan is your next Secretary of Education.   Plenty will be written on that but the punchline is that it’s a good pick on several levels.    Relevant Eduwonk Duncan flashback here.

In the meantime, interesting reform under-story:  The announcement will come at one of the Academy for Urban School Leadership’s schools, the Dodge Renaissance Academy.   Background on AUSL and why it matters in the intro (pp. 11) to this (pdf).   More reform synergy?  AUSL is also a testament to New Leaders for New Schools, (6 of its 11 principals and the co-founder and managing partner are NLNS) which is also described and discussed in the same publication (pdf).

Update:  All your news links here.  Update II:  Don’t miss Carl Cannon’s take.  Update III:  The coveted Freakonomics endorsement!   And, George “Disrupter” Miller gives bloggy approval and goes to the videotape!  Update IV:  The market approves!

This post on “21st Century Skills” generated some interesting comments and a lot of offline communication.  So, I decided to revisit the issue in my US News column this month.

Everyone’s chattering about Sam Dillon’s weekend NYT story on the reform debate.  

I don’t really think the debate that is going on today is a reform v. no reform debate — and that is a change from a decade ago when Bill Clinton was criticized for talking too much about low-performing schools.   Both sides in today’s debate want changes.  Rather, it’s fundamentally a debate about how much of the education problem stems from elements of what schools do, or don’t do, and how much from other factors and all else equal what more schools can realistically be expected to do.   Why the debate matters is because in terms of setting policy for schools, where one comes down on that question is important.

Per the rankings debate down below, now USN ’s Robert Morse reacts to Jay Mathews’ changes to The Challenge Index.    Morse’s bottom line is around test taking v. test passing, and that’s a legitimate issue.  But my concerns about The Challenge Index are rooted in broader concerns about equity and school quality.

Turns out that this last election cycle even NEA members didn’t care a lot about education:

Additionally, only 8% of NEA voters named education as their top concern in choosing a candidate (20% placed it in the top two). The economy and jobs were by far their top issues.

Some new information on teachers coming through The New Teacher Project’s training routes in Louisiana.   The New York Times editorial board likes it!  Allowing non-profit groups like this with high-quality programs to certify teachers alongside — and, yes, in competition with — traditional providers like schools of education is one step toward fixing education’s human capital problem.   The federal government can help here when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is renewed in the next few years by revamping the Title II program (pdf).

So last week it was Paul Herdman and a trout on fly. Today it’s Joe Siedlecki with a smallmouth bass.  And like last week it’s clearly love at first sight!  Joe works on education issues with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.  He caught this one on the Black River in update New York on a small Mepps spoon — a classic.  Wondering what this is all about and have a few spare minutes? Then past fish porn is here and it all started two years ago with Jim Griffin, blame him.

Here’s a bunch of articles on the education secretary debate and here is a set of primers from MDRC about various policy issues that the new administration and next Congress will face.

Update:  In addition to the link above, new back and forth on secretary in The Times, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post, and LA Times.  Update II:  Chicago Trib. jumps in.

It’s not the back and forth of different reform schemes that really gets me going, it’s the back and forth about high school rankings!

Last week U.S. News released its new rankings of American high schools, which include a methodology change:  International Baccalaureate or “IB” is included now thanks to some data changes.  The rankings are an outgrowth of a fun and lively debate that Jay Mathews and I have had for some time about high school rankings.

In particular, as Sara Mead and I wrote in this ES paper (pdf), this WaPo commentary, and as I wrote last year in U.S. News these rankings improve on Jay Mathews’ Newsweek rankings.  While schools that overall are not doing a good job but nonetheless have a small core of kids taking Advanced Placement (AP) and IB courses can make the Newsweek list of “America’s Best High Schools,” the U.S. News list, which - full disc. - I helped develop, includes screens for overall performance and equity in addition to AP and IB pass rates.   

This year Jay is making a change to his ranking method, a “Catching-Up” list for schools with AP or IB test passing rates less than 10 percent.   It’s a start, but Jay and I still have a more basic disagreement about whether schools that are profoundly inequitable should be on a list of the nation’s “best” because they succeed with a small group of students.   And while Jay argues back that the U.S. News list favors selective admission and affluent schools, in fact all kinds of schools can and do make the U.S. News list and the performance benchmarks are more meaningful.

One way to think about this is that Jay’s method focuses on successful classrooms while U.S. News focuses on successful schools.   Perhaps if Jay and Newsweek made a few modifications and re-framed their rankings as America’s “best classrooms” rather than best schools we’d have no debate and could recognize some teachers accomplishing great things with students.

Don’t believe the hype, if you took the over on outgoing LA school superintendent David Brewer that was the right call, he lasted longer than most predicted.  I recall that at the six month or so point when he established a transition team one wag asked whether it was a transition in or out.

Now everyone wants to know who the next lamb to slaughter will be because almost no one with the ability to really turn the district around is going to take the job under the current arrangements.   LA Times columnist Bob Sipchen floats Steve Barr’s name.  But Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools, is too smart and savvy to take job if he has to report to the board.* 

So, perhaps it’s time for the state to get more involved than it is now so that the next person has some political and operational room to maneuver in order to make the system work better for the students it purportedly serves?   Perhaps then it could be set up to entice someone like Barr or Alan Bersin to take it on.

*Past Barr blog action, including guest-blogging.

The world has indeed changed.  It used to be CW that senators couldn’t be elected president.  Now we have a president who wants to be a senator…AFT/UFT President Randi Weingarten is in the mix to be the next senator from New York.  Even Page Six weighs-in.

I hope this doesn’t happen though, and here’s why.  There can be little doubt that Weingarten would be a good senator.  She’s a very good politician, tenacious and hardworking, smart, and agree or disagree with her, she cares.  

So what’s the problem?  It’s that there are other people who can be a good senator from New York but looking around the teachers’ union scene you don’t see a lot of national leaders with the potential to be transformative and move things along past today’s debates.  There are some promising up and comers but if Weingarten leaves now it will leave a vacuum.   She’s already doing two jobs, adding a third is probably untenable even for her.*

Obviously, there are some important differences between Weingarten and many in the reform community, including myself, and big issues yet to be resolved.  Still, if you want to see progress on schools it’s important to recognize the extent to which in different ways there is some interdependency right now in terms of moving the ball on reform at scale and where she stands relative to the situation overall and why that matters.  

*I guess there is precedent here though.  In Rhode Island the head of the Providence Teachers’ Union serves in the statehouse there, too.  That’s always struck me as a great example of union-initiated efficiency improvements in an industry…cut out the middleman!

You’re likely going to hear a lot about Teach For America in the next few weeks as it’s a handy shorthand proxy for reform efforts.   That’s why today’s WaPo front-pager on TFA was somewhat disappointing as a stage-setter.  

First, it seems pretty obvious that the economic situation is fueling an increase in applicants to TFA and to teaching more generally and that’s an easy hook for an article.  But, that angle overlooks how competitive TFA was long before this recession, it’s part of their model.   That seems like a pretty important contextual point that is at best only implicitly mentioned in passing and not made clear for readers.  More information about how the selection process works would have also been helpful as it’s a lot more than grades, school, etc…and there is some real potential learning there for the field overall.

Second, in discussing the effectiveness of TFA teachers the article states:

Research into Teach for America’s effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers. A small handful of other studies, and the organization’s own research, contradict that claim.

This is the classic, pile ‘em up and see which pile is higher approach to education research that too often informs educational journalism.  It’s always easy to say something is inconclusive, and often things are, but not always is it the case.    In fact, while there has been a lot of “research” into TFA the methodologically most solid studies have shown that TFA teachers are as good or better than other teachers, including veteran and traditionally trained teachers.   Mathematica (pdf) and Urban Institute/CALDER are the two best examples — and those are independent analyses not TFA studies. 

Among serious researchers and policy analysts there is a debate about how significant these impacts are in the context of the achievement gaps we face and what could amplify the impact as well as what the policy implications are.  But, there is no serious debate that TFA is lowering achievement for students.   At the same time, school districts and cities are clamoring to get TFA teachers, that’s an important contextual point, too.  These teachers are not being forced on schools — quite the opposite.

Third, the article seems to misread the importance of TFA’s impact.    While many teachers do leave classroom teaching after their two-year commitment,  about two-thirds remain in education full time and more than 40 percent in the classroom.  They also go on to become principals, and superintendents, start schools, launch organizations, and otherwise have impact.    That compares favorably with attrition rates in the most challenging schools.    In relation to the research, if TFA’ers were not, on average, helping students while they are teaching then the secondary impact would be insufficient as a justification for the program but that’s not the case.  

Finally, in relation to all this it’s no secret (even at The Post) that Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor and candidate for Secretary of Education and the current policy lead for President Elect-Obama has been a pretty harsh critic of TFA since its inception.  That’s, you know, interesting isn’t it?  But too interesting for the story apparently!  

David Brooks in The Times and the Wash Post ed board weigh-in on what they want to see in the next secretary of education.  In a word, reform.  Past “what’s next” items here.  Update:   TNR jumps into the fray.   Update II:   Jonathan Alter and an AP story with a lot of signaling.  Update III:  Newsweek v. Newsweek?  Howard Fineman here.  Update IV:   More TNR!  Update V:   Jonathan Zasloff on labor pains.