The Department of Education announced the winners of the Race to the Top competition today.  Of the 16 finalists, Tennessee ($502 million) and Delaware ($107 million) will be the only applicants to receive money in the first round.  Surprisingly, front-runners Florida and Louisiana finished out of the money this round as did several large states including New York and Illinois.  We are still waiting on the score-sheets and reviewers comments to be released. Should be some interesting info there.  For those of you who want to read about the first round winners check out Ed-Week, The Wall St. Journal,and The New York Times. I also plan to keep an eye on Rick Hess’s blog.  He’s had some great RTTT analysis. Here is his take on today’s announcement:

Looking at Delaware and Tennessee leaves me thinking that all the talk about bold reform was window dressing. The states that explicitly set out to blow past conventions, and devil take the hindmost, fell by the wayside. Florida and Louisiana’s bold, action-backed plans–which reflected a belief that they could push forward if they did so only with the eager and willing–lost out to states that obtained laughable levels of buy-in from school districts, school boards, and local teachers’ unions.

*****

Placing this much weight on ‘stakeholder support’ is going to feed cynicism about the sincerity of Duncan’s calls for bold, transformative change. Hard to square this very conventional emphasis on consensus with all his tough talk. Of course, this does remind us of his famously cautious reform efforts in Chicago. Wonder if the White House is having second thoughts yet about having passed on Joel Klein?

UPDATE: The DOE has posted the score-sheets and reviewers comments. Here is the DOE press release, and here is a ranking of state scores.

If Diane Ravitch insists that there’s no evidence on a particular point, you can be almost certain that there is. Here’s her piece on mayoral control, from a recent issue of Phi Delta Kappan:

Matt Miller of the Center for American Progress . . . argued that local control and local school boards are the basic cause of poor student performance. . . . In an ideal world, he wrote, we would scrap local boards and replace them with mayoral control, especially in urban districts. This one act of removing all democratic governance, he claimed, would lead to better education. . . . There is not a shred of evidence in Miller’s article or in the research literature that schools improve when democratic governance ends.

Once again, Ravitch misrepresents the literature. For example, there’s Kenneth Wong’s study of mayoral control, which found that “mayoral control has a statistically significant, positive effect on student achievement.” Granted, Wong’s study may be imperfect and it may be difficult to properly measure something as nebulous and potentially endogenous as mayoral control. But trying to refute Wong would be more defensible than claiming definitively that studies like his don’t even exist.

P.S. If you’re going to discuss scholarly literature with which you’re not familiar, the wiser approach is to say, “I’ve never seen convincing evidence that such-and-such,” which leaves you two easy outs: if anyone points out a study, all you have to do is note that you hadn’t personally seen it, and/or that you don’t find it convincing.

P.P.S. The Wong article above appeared in a book to which Ravitch herself contributed an article. So Ravitch had to know that her “not a shred of evidence” comment was false.

Last week we heard from Theodore M. Hesburgh.  Hesburgh, a founding member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King), wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal chastising Democrats for failing to support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

This week the acting president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, spoke at a Miami rally of 5,500 in support of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship for low income children.

I wonder if anyone is listening?

“It is no coincidence that the first African-American to live in the White House is a man with an Ivy League degree, and just last summer President Obama made a powerful point about our history. There’s a reason, our President said, the story of the civil rights movement was written in our schools.  There’s a reason, he said, that Thurgood Marshall took up the cause of Linda Brown.  There’s a reason, he said, why the Little Rock Nine defied a governor and a mob. It’s because, President Obama told us, there is no stronger weapon against inequality and no better path to opportunity than an education that can unlock a child’s God-given potential.

I say to you today that the Tax Credit Scholarship program is one of the keys we use to unlock that potential. It is one way we can reach some of those children who go to bed hungry at night. It is one way we show that an empty pocketbook doesn’t have to mean an empty bookshelf – that all our learning tools need to be on the table for all our children.

I am here today as a messenger of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and I am here to proudly proclaim that the organization created by Dr. King believes that a scholarship for low-income children is one way to break the cycle and close the gap. I am here, standing before this inspiring sea of hopeful faces, to announce that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference endorses Tax Credit Scholarships and endorses the bill this year that will expand them. This is our future. God bless you all.”

(HT: Matt Ladner)

Diane Ravitch said the following at a recent event:

“Every test publisher says, to my knowledge, and everyone who’s involved in the psychological testing business says, the tests should be used only for the purpose for which they’re intended. If a test is intended to measure a 5th grader’s ability to read, it’s not developed and designed to measure whether the teacher is effective. There are all kinds of reasons why students’ scores are higher or lower which may have nothing to do with the effectiveness of the teacher but rather with a million other things.”

What if we want to know whether the 5th grade teacher was effective at teaching the 5th graders to read? What exactly would be covered on the test other than items measuring the 5th graders’ ability to read? I understand the point that there are lots of reasons the 5th graders might not do very well (low SES, bad family circumstances, homelessness, illiteracy at the start of the grade, etc.), but none of those factors have anything to do with how the test itself would be written, would they?

Elvis Says "Don't Be Cruel"!!

Who dances with whom at prom?  Are we kidding?  How about worrying about who graduates and what they’ve learned ……

A few weeks ago, most people in the US, or in the world, had never heard of Itawamba Agricultural High School (IAHS) in Fulton,  Mississippi.  Fulton is less than 30 minutes from Tupelo, made famous of course by one Elvis Aaron Presley.  We’ll get back to that in a moment.

Itawamba Agricultural High School serves 689 students. The school is relatively advantaged — fewer than 40% of the students qualify for subsidized lunches (as compared to 58% statewide) — and very white (nearly 9 of 10 students are white).   The students are doing OK on state tests — In three of the four subjects, IAHS is higher than the Mississippi state average. In U.S. History, 79% of IAHS students scored proficient/advanced (state total 63%), 75% in Biology I (state total 63%), and 67% in English II (state total 49%).   The students do less well in Algebra I where 63% of the state’s students scored proficient or advanced, while at IAHS only 59% did so.  In terms of graduation rates, the school is near the national average at about 75%.

Overall, this reasonably advantaged school does fine.  And, perhaps since this school does not get recognized for exemplary performance, their fine leaders have sought recognition for other accomplishments, such as making gay high school students feel even more uncomfortable.

By now,  we have most likely heard about the Itawamba Agricultural High School in Mississippi for cancelling prom rather than allow a Lesbian student named Constance McMillen bring her girlfriend to the dance.  Of course, this is a cruel decision that may well lead to bullying and harassment by her peers who were deprived of their prom.

You might ask, upon what school policy did they base such an odd decision?  Don’t worry, the school did have a policy that required that senior prom dates be of the opposite sex.  Thanks goodness that our school leaders are attending to the important details! Otherwise, they might have time to think about how to ensure the graduation of those 25% of the school’s students who don’t make it …

Elvis, a well-known promoter of equality and fairness (despite unfounded rumors) would not have approved!

Some researchers at Berkely have found that taking naps can improve learning.  I could use some learning about now.  From USA Today:

Naps make you smarter and boost your ability to learn, say researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, they’re the brain’s way of making room for new information.

The longer we stay awake, the less able our brains are to learn. But just 60 minutes of shut-eye can boost learning ability significantly, says Matthew Walker, a Berkeley professor of psychology and the lead investigator of a study presented over the weekend at the American Association of the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego, Calif..

The research could be interpreted to mean that a biphasic sleep schedule – a good night’s sleep and a solid midday siesta, could increase intelligence.

Compare that with pulling an all-nighter, which previous research by this group showed can decrease the ability to learn by 40%. This learning deficit is caused by a shutting down of brain regions due to sleep deprivation.

In the study, a group of 39 healthy young adults were divided into a nap and no-nap group. Each were given a difficult to-learn task at noon, designed to push hard on the hippocampus, the region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Research has shown that fact-based memories are first stored in the hippocampus, then moved to the prefrontal cortex for long-term storage.

Both groups did about the same.

At 2:00 PM in the afternoon the nap group got a 90-minute siesta.  Then at 6:00 PM both groups got a new set of learning tasks. The ones who hadn’t gotten any shut-eye did markedly worse. Those who had caught 40 winks did much better and improved their capacity to learn.

Walker says this helps confirm his group’s hypothesis, that sleep clears the brain’s short-term memory storage to make room for new learning. Walker presented his preliminary findings Sunday at the AAAS Conference.

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said in a release.

On Tuesday the Democrat led U.S. Senate failed to reauthorize the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, despite pleas and support from Senators Feinstein, Nelson, Warner, and Lieberman.

Local chumps Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln voted against the program. Lifted from the Wall Street Journal, here’s a letter to them and other Democrats from Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, the former president of the University of Notre Dame.

A Setback for Educational Civil Rights

By THEODORE M. HESBURGH

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked me to become one of the founding members of the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, African-Americans drank at separate water fountains and our schools were segregated. A decade later, when people came together to march against these injustices, the idea that a black man could ever be elected president of the United States was still something for dreamers. My experience with that great movement gives me a particular appreciation for the historic importance of the presidency of Barack Obama—and the new dreams that his example will inspire in our young.

If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country’s race problem is plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids. So I was especially heartened to hear Education Secretary Arne Duncan repeatedly call education the “civil rights issue of our generation.” Millions of our children—disproportionately poor and minority—remain trapped in failing public schools that condemn them to lives on the fringe of the American Dream.

For all these reasons, I was deeply disappointed when Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) successfully inserted a provision in last year’s omnibus spending bill that ended one of the best efforts to give these struggling children the chance to attend a safe and decent school.

That effort is called the Opportunity Scholarship program. Since 2004 it has allowed thousands of children in Washington, D.C., to escape one of the worst public school systems in the nation by providing them with scholarships of up to $7,500.

Despite its successes, it is now closing down. On Tuesday the Senate voted against a measure introduced by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) that would have extended the program. Throughout this process Mr. Duncan’s Education Department and the White House raised no protest.

Much has been written about the crisis in education, and the effective resegregation of our public schools. It’s clear who is paying the price. A study a few years ago from Johns Hopkins University highlighted the terrible disparity of the current system: Nearly half of our nation’s African-American students, nearly 40% of Latino students, but only 11% of white students attend high schools in which graduation is not the norm.

Many of the parents using Opportunity Scholarships chose Catholic schools for their children even though they are not Catholic themselves. That’s no coincidence. When others abandoned the cities, the Catholic schools remained, and they continue to do heroic work.

At Notre Dame we launched our own efforts to bolster this mission. Our Alliance for Catholic Education, for example, takes talented young men and women, trains them to see teaching as a career, and then sends them into struggling inner-city schools such as Holy Redeemer in Washington, D.C.

But these inner-city schools can’t do it themselves. Recently the archdiocese of Washington announced that Holy Redeemer would be forced to close its doors at the end of the year because the families who send their children to the school are unable to afford it without the financial aid they receive from this program. The archdiocese stated that “decisions last year by the U.S. Department of Education and by Congress to phase out the federal D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program . . . negatively impacted Holy Redeemer’s financial situation.”

Of Holy Redeemer’s 149 students, 60 were on Opportunity Scholarships. Unlike so many of their peers, these kids were on their way to college. Now they have to find some other safe haven. Others will never get the chance at all.

I know that some consider voucher programs such as the Opportunity Scholarships a right-wing affair. I do not accept that label. This program was passed with the bipartisan support of a Republican president and Democratic mayor. The children it serves are neither Republican nor Democrat, liberal or conservative. They are the future of our nation, and they deserve better from our nation’s leaders.

I have devoted my life to equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless of skin color. I don’t pretend that this one program is the answer to all the injustices in our education system. But it is hard to see why a program that has proved successful shouldn’t have the support of our lawmakers. The end of Opportunity Scholarships represents more than the demise of a relatively small federal program. It will help write the end of more than a half-century of quality education at Catholic schools serving some of the most at-risk African-American children in the District.

I cannot believe that a Democratic administration will let this injustice stand.

Father Hesburgh is the former president of the University of Notre Dame.

I have a bone to pick with Steve Clark, President and CEO of the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce. Recently Steve has been in the news a lot advocating for a city business license and against having event organizers who use city property open their books.

Brian discussed the business license issue last week, but I would like to add a few thoughts. Brian correctly asserted the license fee amounts to a new tax, but the question remains – Why is the Chamber of Commerce advocating for a new tax on business? I think the answer is two-fold. First, in the wake of the financial downturn city budgets are tightening, and Fayetteville has not entirely avoided this pain. A significant portion of the chambers budget comes from the city coffers. So, what is being spun to the public as an attempt to help businesses may actually be an attempt to create a dedicated tax to support the chamber. Second, a list of all businesses in Fayetteville would be extremely helpful in helping the chamber collect more membership dues.

From where I sit, the business license looks like a chamber attempt to reach into other people’s pockets to support their activities while having the city crack down on those who do not comply. The license fee would likely give the chamber a guaranteed revenue stream at a time when membership dues are falling and city funding is uncertain. So what’s with all this, “We just want to help business.” All we ask is for a little honesty, Steve.

Last night Steve showed up at the City Council meeting to rail against councilman Matthew Petty’s proposal to have events that make use of city property and last longer than two days open their books. Look, I do not know if Petty’s proposal was well written legally, and it is possible that the proposal represented an undue burden for event organizers.  That said, the thrust of Steve’s criticism of the proposal did not rest on this perfectly reasonable ground. Instead he tried to make the claim that requiring more openness from people who use city property is equivalent to calling them liars. The Northwest Arkansas Times quoted Steve saying

“It appears — the way it is written — the wrong that it tries to address, is that people cheat on their taxes,” Clark declared, his baritone voice booming. “It tries to say that people are trying to cheat the city.

“This says, ‘You know what, we just don’t trust you. We just don’t believe you tried to do right,’” said Clark, who also serves on the Bikes Blues & BBQ board. “That’s an insult.”

So, let me get this straight, it is insulting to ask people who receive a subsidy from the city (land use is a subsidy) to be open and honest about their financial records? In Steve’s world of good ole’ boys and cronies we should all just trust each other and everything will work out right in the end. But, it seems to me the State of Arkansas already trusted Steve, and that trust was betrayed when he was convicted for misusing a state credit card.

Steve revels himself as the wost kind of  political hack when he advocates for bad policy like an arbitrary tax on business and less openness in government. His latest actions seem to indicate that he cares less about the substance of the policy, and more about whether or not he will benefit from it.

Here’s the currently ubiquitous Diane Ravitch, speaking to National Review about public charter schools: “Some of them are absolutely awful and should never have been chartered and should be closed.”

But here she is in February writing about other public schools: “Closing Schools Solves Nothing.” And from her Twitter account just the other day: “What genius thought that closing schools would lead to better schools? Where has it worked? No anecdotes, please.”

Public charter schools? Bring down the hammer and close them if they’re not performing. But traditional public schools? Ah, they all have that secret magic ingredient that prevents them from ever being bad enough to close.

There’s an . . . interesting argument being circulated in the education world, to the effect that because a handful of schools or teachers are motivated to cheat on standardized tests, the real blame should be laid on the fact that we have tests in the first place.

Here’s Diane Ravitch (formerly a staunch defender of testing), speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on March 10:

There’s a front page story in the Chicago Sun-Times Today about thousands of test scores being erased and altered to raise them. This is what the pressure for proficiency has created: institutionalized fraud.

Similarly, there’s this from a March 5 article on possible cheating in Houston:

“Cheating on tests has been rampant,” said Tom Haladyna, professor emeritus in the College of Teacher Education and Leadership at Arizona State University. “Many of us think the culprit is tying accountability to a single test score. It is a bad policy. It motivates a few to cheat so they can look good.”

By this logic, such as it is, we should abolish medical boards for potential doctors, tests for commercial pilots to get licensed, bar exams for attorneys, and tests to be licensed as a nuclear engineer, if it turns out that cheating ever occurs. After all, if any of these poor souls are so stressed out that they cheat on an important test, it’s really our fault for asking them to meet performance standards in the first place.

Needless to say, this is one of the weaker arguments against testing.