From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education reform.
Add energy research to the list of arenas in which Team Obama has recognized the power of regional economies to deliver innovation as well as economic growth.
Last week we noticed the spread into multiple federal agency budgets of FY 2011 program proposals aimed at supporting regional industry clusters--the geographic concentrations of interconnected firms and supporting organizations that play such an important role in enhancing regional economic performance.
For many, what makes a neighborhood or a community a great place to live is a mix of people, activities, and physical forms. Quality places are those neighborhoods and communities that have a range of housing types, so that people who live in small households or on tight budgets aren’t excluded; many transportation options, so that cars are a convenience, but not a necessity; and houses, stores, and offices interspersed and within easy reach of each other, again so that daily life doesn’t require getting behind the wheel.
Public policies, from local decisions about zoning codes to national decisions about light rail and highways, can facilitate or hinder the growth of these places. Generally, the federal government has been more of a hindrance because it focuses on housing and transportation programs, rather than the places in which housing and transportation come together. (If housing and transportation aren’t connected, why do suburban houses have driveways?)
The administration’s 2011 budget proposal shows some movement away from this narrow focus on programs and towards a greater understanding of the need to integrate what different agencies do to create great places to live and work. The administration has allocated close to $690 million for its Sustainable Communities Initiative, a partnership between the Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency to promote regional planning efforts that integrate housing, transportation, and other investments. That more than quadruples the $150 million allocated to the initiative in FY 2010.
In a FY 2011 budget that freezes non-defense discretionary expenditures, the Department of Education has attracted some attention for being one of the few places in the federal government that would attract an increase in funding if the plan is enacted. But the old stuff in the administration’s proposal is at least as interesting as what’s new.
The budget foresees about a $3 billion increase overall for the department, a 6 percent rise over the FY 2010 request. More money for K-12 programs authorized by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), more recently known as No Child Left Behind, accounts for all of this increase, and the administration is signaling that it will put a good deal of energy behind its proposal to strengthen teaching standards as part of a broader ESEA overhaul.
Meanwhile, next year’s budget seeks to build on some of the significant, competitive education programs that were embedded in the stimulus package (ARRA) and are just coming online now. With the first round of state applications for the competitive $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) Fund recently arrived at the department, the budget requests another $1.35 billion to continue the race in FY 2011. States will probably welcome the opportunity to compete for additional federal education funds next year, with their budgets still in crisis, just as the administration would surely relish the opportunity to continue its signature domestic “reform” program. And cash-strapped local governments could jump at the chance, too, as the budget signals that the next round of RTT would make school districts eligible for awards as well.
Forget the spending freeze. Obama's Department of Education announced on Monday that it is asking Congress for more money in the 2011 budget. The department wants $49.7 billion in discretionary funds, roughly $3.5 billion more than it got in 2010. (That's on top of the $173 billion that would go to student loans, grants, tax credits, and work-study programs.) And, if Congress finally reauthorizes No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--it's already three years overdue--to include the president's reforms, the administration says it would allot another billion to the discretionary pot.
The closest thing Congress has to its own Tea Party takes place every Wednesday afternoon, in the Gold Room of the Rayburn House Office building. At 1:15, more than 100 congressmen and one aide each gather for the meeting of the Republican Study Committee, and for a little over an hour, the legislators chat about their latest projects to reduce the size of government--or, at least, to stop the latest Democrat effort to expand it.
California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door.
Pop quiz: You read a draft notice for a federal grant program containing the terms, “internal validity,” “quasi-experimental,” “regression discontinuity,” and “interrupted time series.” The program in question is:
a) A CDC program to fund pre-development of the porcupine flu vaccine
b) An FDA program to spur commercialization of an at-home test for polonium in your food
c) A NASA program to support design of a low-cost module that will allow humans to populate Venus
d) A Department of Education program designed to support and scale innovation in K-12 education
Answer: d). These and other Econometrics 101 terms can be found in the just-released prepublication notice for the new Investing in Innovation (I3) Fund at the Department of Education. What’s going on here? Are Secretary Arne Duncan and his deputies just showing off?
Actually, the structure they are proposing for this new $650 million fund deserves a close look. Last year, Sara Mead and Andy Rotherham called on the department to help bring successful educational entrepreneurs to scale, and to purposefully foster transformative educational innovations. It envisioned achieving these aims through two separate funds that the department would operate, but I3’s design could permit Duncan (and in particular, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton) to pursue both goals.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke this morning at the first in a series of public meetings about the belated reauthorization of No Child Left Behind--although, because it's become a "toxic brand" in many circles, the Department of Education now prefers to call it by its official name, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In his remarks to representatives of roughly 160 education, business, and other stakeholder groups, Duncan praised aspects of the law, which President Bush signed in 2002. He emphasized that it has helped expose achievement gaps and "expand the standards and accountability movement." But Duncan also underscored the urgent need to reform the much-debated law, which he said has "unfairly labeled many schools as failures" and allowed states to set their bars for academic success too low.
Under the current ESEA, states can largely devise their own academic standards, as well as the methods for meeting them, which has left a patchwork of weak policies blanketing the country--or created what Duncan likes to call a “race to the bottom.” Laying out his vision of the federal government's role in reauthorization, Duncan said the ESEA shouldn't offer a "prescription for," but rather, "a common definition of success." He said, "We should be tight on goals … [but] loose on means." In other words, for the first time, there should be national standards of academic success, but states should also have flexibility in deciding how best to reach them.* California and Nevada should have the same targets for students' progress in, say, reading and math skills, but they might have different methods of getting kids to those goals.
After Duncan exited the meeting, audience members lined up to offer comments and suggestions for the reauthorization to a handful of Department of Education officials. The Q&A was generally uneventful and bureaucratic--nebulous questions followed by even more nebulous answers. Two themes, however, caught my attention:
There are a billion different iterations of the joke, usually inflicted upon children by adults:
Child: Daddy, why are you flapping your arms and quacking in the middle of the street?
Father: To keep the alligators away.
Child: Daddy. There are no alligators around here.
Father: See? It's working.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed today that $3.5 billion in grants dedicated to improving Title I schools--or those with at least 40 percent of students from low-income families--should go to school districts committed to "turnaround" strategies.
States will soon be applying for shares of the Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund, a $4.35-billion portion of the stimulus package that the Department of Education will dole out based on states' commitment to education reform. There are 19 criteria for receiving RTTT money.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
In looking for something else this morning, I ran across a couple of conservative blog posts that almost perfectly illustrated how rapidly routine information can be distorted into talking points used in attacks on the Obama administration, the Democratic Congress, and in this case, state and local governments.
It would seem like a pretty good gig: About 1,400 teachers in New York City are receiving full salaries and benefits even though they don't have permanent jobs. Two hundred and five of them have been without full-time work for three years. And they can continue receiving payments indefinitely even if they never secure new positions.
On September 7 Deval Patrick, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, filed a brief in a New Jersey case arguing that it is legal to fire a white teacher over a black teacher purely because of her race. And on August 19 a federal district judge in Austin, Texas, held that aspects of the affirmative action program at the University of Texas law school are unconstitutional. One or both of the cases may reach the Supreme Court before long. Each on its own could revive the debate about racial preferences and ventilate their more troubling assumptions.
