Harkin's No Child Left Behind Bill No Longer Mandates Teacher Evaluations

This from the Huffington Post:

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) shifted a major teacher evaluation requirement out of his rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- known as No Child Left Behind -- over the weekend, shifting the dynamics of the debate over the bill's passage.

The initial sweeping education law called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was enacted in 1965, and a 2001 reauthorization under George W. Bush took on the name, "No Child Left Behind." The law has been up for reauthorization since 2007. Harkin's rewrite, the first comprehensive reform to the legislation, came out of negotiations with Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions committee that Harkin chairs.

Harkin released a draft of the bill last week that required school districts and states which receive educator development funding to create teacher evaluation systems that would take student performance into account. But changes over the weekend through a manager's amendment removed the requirement from the bill, instead shifting the teacher evaluation component to a competitive grant program called the Teacher Incentive Fund.

A Harkin staffer told The Huffington Post that the changes resulted from conversations with teachers, teachers' unions, and HELP committee members. Harkin reluctantly shifted the language in search of a bipartisan path forward, the staffer explained on background because she wasn't authorized to speak on the record about the issue.

The changes resulted in Enzi's first public showing of enthusiastic support for the bill. "This is not a perfect bill, nor does it solve every education issue," Enzi said Monday in a statement. "But it will make a huge, positive difference to our nation's young people."

The move led to increased support from teachers' unions, but the withdrawal of support from data-driven education reform groups. It also led to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's criticism of Harkin's capitulation...

Reforming NCLB Requires Flexibility and Accountability

This from Arne Duncan at the Ed.gov blog:

Fixing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is four years overdue. In March of 2010, the Administration unveiled its Blueprint for Reform. Since then we’ve worked on a bipartisan basis to craft a comprehensive reform bill that would help give our children the world-class education they need and deserve. Today marks an important step forward.

Senator Tom Harkin and Senator Mike Enzi — Chairman and Ranking Member respectively of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — introduced a bipartisan bill to officially overhaul NCLB. I deeply appreciate the efforts of Senators Harkin and Enzi to build in more flexibility for states and districts, and focus on the goal of building a world-class education system that prepares all students for college and careers. Increased flexibility at the state and local level is consistent with the administration’s policy on waivers and our Blueprint for Reform.

However, it is equally important that we maintain a strong commitment to accountability for the success of all students, and I am concerned that the Senate bill does not go far enough. Parents, teachers, and state leaders across the country understand that in order to prepare all of our young people to compete in the global economy, we must hold ourselves and each other accountable at every level of the education system– from the classroom to the school district, from the states to the federal government. In addition, I am concerned the Senate bill lacks a comprehensive evaluation and support system to guide teachers and principals in continuing to improve their practice.

America cannot retreat from reform. We must ensure that every classroom in every school is a place of high expectations and high performance. The fact that we have a bipartisan bill in the Senate is an important and positive development, but it’s only a beginning. I look forward to working with Congress in the weeks and months ahead to advance this bipartisan effort, address these and other concerns and build a world-class education system that strengthens America’s economy and secures America’s future.

ESEA reauthorization (Not NCLB)

This from Arne Duncan via email:


Dear Education Stakeholders:

By now, I expect you’ve heard the good news. In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) – “when” we reauthorize, not “if,” he emphasized – and, at a time when most government spending is frozen, the President proposed a significant increase in discretionary spending for education in his fiscal year 2011 budget.

The President’s budget continues and expands his commitment to provide a cradle-to-career education for all of America’s children. It provides a massive increase in student aid – $156 billion in fiscal year 2011, up from $98 billion in 2008. That’s enough to provide federal assistance to nearly 15 million students, or 3 out of 5 students currently enrolled in higher education. The budget also will make it easier for borrowers to repay their loans, lowering income-based repayments and cutting the length of their repayments.

In K-12 education, the President will propose a $4 billion increase, including the previously announced $1.35 billion request to make Race to the Top a permanent program. Of that increase, $1 billion would be made available through a budget amendment when Congress completes an ESEA reauthorization consistent with the President’s plan.

The budget also supports enactment of pending legislation that would provide $9.3 billion over 10 years for the Early Learning Challenge Fund, providing competitive grants to states that expand quality early learning experiences from birth through kindergarten entry.

Along with the increases, the budget will require us to work smarter and more efficiently. We expect to save billions by switching from the Federal Family Education Loan program to the Direct Loan program. In K-12 education, we will provide states and districts more flexibility by consolidating 38 programs into 11, and we will cut six programs that are ineffective or duplicative.

The budget will set the stage for ESEA reauthorization but there is still much more work ahead. With a bipartisan group of members of Congress, our goal is to develop an accountability system built on greater transparency, incentives and rewards, and a focus on turning around persistently underperforming schools.

We can’t wait to make these reforms. Right now, 25 percent of our students fail to graduate high school, and as many as 60 percent of college freshmen need remedial education. Millions of jobs are unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. The President and I know that we need to educate our way to a better economy. I am honored to be working with you to make it happen.

Sincerely,

/s/

Arne Duncan

Department Circulates ESEA PowerPoint on the Hill

This from Politics K-12:

The U.S. Department of Education is shopping this Elementary and Secondary Education Act PowerPoint presentation to congressional aides this week, meant to lay out broad principles for renewing the law, now known as the No Child Left Behind Act.

And if you take a look at the presentation, the broad principles are, well, pretty broad. There doesn't seem to be much in there that folks who are following Race to the Top Fund and other major Obama administration initiatives wouldn't have guessed. Does that mean the department's still got a ways to go on the details?

Still, the powerpoint is a sign that the administration wants to get moving on renewing the law, even though many insiders are guessing that getting a bill passed by the end of next year is going to be an uphill battle.

Education Lessons We Left Behind

This from Goerge Will in today's Washington Post:

If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America

the mediocre educational performance that exists today,

we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
-- "A Nation at Risk" (1983)

Let us limp down memory lane to mark this week's melancholy 25th anniversary of a national commission's report that galvanized Americans to vow to do better. Today the nation still ignores what had been learned years before 1983.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once puckishly said that data indicated that the leading determinant of the quality of public schools, measured by standardized tests, was the schools' proximity to Canada. He meant that the geographic correlation was stronger than the correlation between high test scores and high per-pupil expenditures.

Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities -- the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.

Chester Finn, a former Moynihan aide, notes in his splendid new memoir "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik") that during the Depression-era job scarcity, high schools were used to keep students out of the job market, shunting many into nonacademic classes. By 1961, those classes had risen to 43 percent of all those taken by students. After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money. Between 1975 and 1980 there were a thousand strikes involving a million teachers whose salaries rose as students' scores on standardized tests declined.

In 1964, SAT scores among college-bound students peaked. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) codified confidence in the correlation between financial inputs and cognitive outputs in education. But in 1966, the Coleman report, the result of the largest social science project in history, reached a conclusion so "seismic" -- Moynihan's description -- that the government almost refused to publish it.

Released quietly on the Fourth of July weekend, the report concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools' effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class -- fractured families -- would have to be faced.

But it wasn't. Instead, shopworn panaceas -- larger teacher salaries, smaller class sizes -- were pursued as colleges were reduced to offering remediation to freshmen.

In 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Education Department, a monument to the premise that money and government programs matter most. At the NEA's behest, the nation has expanded the number of teachers much faster than the number of students has grown. Hiring more, rather than more competent, teachers meant more dues-paying union members. For decades, schools have been treated as laboratories for various equity experiments. Fads incubated in education schools gave us "open" classrooms, teachers as "facilitators of learning" rather than transmitters of knowledge, abandonment of a literary canon in the name of "multiculturalism," and so on, producing a majority of high school juniors who could not locate the Civil War in the proper half-century.

In 1994, Congress grandly decreed that by 2000 the high school graduation rate would be "at least" 90 percent and that American students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement." Moynihan, likening such goals to Soviet grain quotas -- solemnly avowed, never fulfilled -- said: "That will not happen." It did not.

Moynihan was a neoconservative before neoconservatism became a doctrine of foreign policy hubris.

Originally, it taught domestic policy humility. Moynihan, a social scientist, understood that social science tells us not what to do but what is not working, which today includes No Child Left Behind. Finn thinks NCLB got things backward: "The law should have set uniform standards and measures for the nation, then freed states, districts and schools to produce those results as they think best." Instead, it left standards up to the states, which have an incentive to dumb them down to make compliance easier.

A nation at risk? Now more than ever.