Reacting to some criticism from civil rights groups, Obama defended his education policies during a speech to the Urban League yesterday.  He spoke at length about The Race to the Top initiative and addressed a number of concerns.  It’s also interesting that he acknowledged how much change has been created by simply tempting them with Race to the Top money, even though most states won’t see any.  Here are the most relevant video clips:

A couple of days ago, someone who identified himself as Jim Nicholas, “VP of Production” for Today in America, commented on my original post that discussed Fayetteville’s plans to pay the promotional group for airtime.  What he said and my response are here.

Full disclosure: I received no payment from Mr. Nicholas in exchange for allowing him to use this media channel.

Mike Petrilli makes a good point about charter school studies:

[C]harters serving lots of poor or low-performing kids made a significant positive impact on math achievement, while “middle class” charter schools had a negative effect on both math and reading. You could joke that this is evidence that charters are closing the achievement gap: they are helping low-performing poor kids make gains and affluent kids lose ground.

So what’s going on? If you know a little bit about the charter school movement, these findings make a ton of sense. While the media mostly pay attention to inner-city charter schools—think KIPP, Achievement First, Harlem Success, etc.—several of the early-adopter states (like Minnesota, California, and Colorado) are also home to suburban charter schools. And many of those schools were created by progressive educators or parents as an alternative to the traditional public schools nearby. Schools like Minnesota New Country School, whose mission is to “explore the world through project-based learning.”

As far as I can tell, lots of these uber-progressive schools are quite good, and achieve excellent results in terms of student success in college and beyond. There’s a strong argument to be made—and Education Evolving makes it here—that there should be room within public education for these kinds of schools and their innovative approaches. But these institutions sure aren’t focused on getting kids ready to pass the state standardized test. So, compared to their traditional school counterparts, their test scores suffer.

This is why Diane Ravitch’s view of charter schools is so utterly incoherent — she manages to criticize NCLB for making schools focus too much on test scores even while criticizing charters and vouchers for failing to produce high enough test scores. And it turns out that charter schools (on average) aren’t producing high enough test scores in part because some charter schools are doing exactly what Ravitch purports to favor — offering an interesting curriculum that isn’t as focused on test scores.

It’s hard to square that circle.

There are a couple of items in the news today that our readers might find interesting. First, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is scheduled to give a speech at the National Press Club today during which he will announce the Race to the Top finalists. The Arkansas Department of Education is hopeful we will be among the states that are listed after having narrowly missed the cut last time. You can find the Department of ED press release here and can watch the speech live at 11:30 a.m. CT here.

UPDATE: Arkansas was not named as a second round finalist. Check out the Ed Week article here.

Second, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has released their annual Kids Count report. There is a wealth of interesting data at their web site here. Check out the widget below for a quick look at the data.

The Dem Gaz has a summary article here. The report uses measures of child well-being to rank the states. The measures span several dimensions of well-being including education, health, and economics. Arkansas slipped one place in the overall rankings to 48th, but picked up ground in several key areas. Here are a few stats from the Dem Gaz article.

Arkansas has improved in five areas since 2000: infant mortality rate, child death rate, teenage death rate, teenage birth-rate and the percentage of teenagers without high school degrees who are not in school.

The state fared worse in low infant birth weights and the number of children in single-parent families.

*****

The state saw no change in the percentage of children living in poverty, which was 25 percent in both 2000 and 2008. The federal poverty level for a two-parent family with two children was a household income of $21,834 in 2008.

*****

Arkansas’ highest ranking was 37th in infant mortality rates.

While 8.4 of every 1,000 live births in the state ended in death in 2000, that number dropped to 7.7 in 2007. The U.S. infant mortality rate was 6.7 of 1,000 live births in 2007.

*****

Arkansas ranked 50th in percent of teenagers ages 16 to 19 not working and not attending school, at 12 percent in 2008 compared with 8 percent nationwide.

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On Tuesday, the Fayetteville City Council approved spending nearly $20,000 dollars to buy paid infomercial time on the infomercial show “Today in America.” See the Fayetteville Flyer coverage here.  See my previous post where I raised questions that the circumstances of this show contacting Fayetteville was a scam here. 

I guess we can at least be grateful that the company isn’t based in Nigeria.  We’d probably end up losing more than 20k.

At the same time, we should be ashamed that we aren’t spending this money locally.  There are great videographers at the UofA who could do a better and less expensive job.  So much for buying locally.

The biggest “scam” aspect of this entire enterprise is how the city seems to believe that they are somehow special to the show’s producers.  They continually point out that Today in America has a special interest in us.  In one news story, Mayor Jordan and Lindsley Smith characterize the show’s producers’ interest like this:

In the case of the local segment, the producers contacted Fayetteville officials several weeks ago to inquire about shooting the piece, said Mayor Lioneld Jordan. The production company took interest in the Fayetteville Forward economic development initiative Jordan used to ask residents what sort of community they wanted Fayetteville to be.

Lindsley Smith, the city’s communication director, said the show’s producers are also interested in taking a closer look at what contributes to what many see as Fayetteville’s high quality of life. The segment will highlight why Fayetteville is a top environment for business.

40/29 recently carried this quote:

Fayetteville wasn’t chosen randomly. The show’s producers focus on cities they say are hidden gems: nice places to live, with plenty of business opportunities, and communities that are still growing.

Like I pointed out in my earlier post, Today in America casts a broad net and will feature a story on anyone and everyone who is willing to pay their fee.  Here is a report saying the same from CBS MoneyWatch.com.

I’m not saying we aren’t special, just saying that you shouldn’t have to pay to be made to feel special.  Wait, isn’t that the plot of a recent Soderbergh film?

UPDATE: The NWA Times has a great piece about this in today’s paper.  In addition to expressing skepticism about the authenticity of Today In America’s interest in Fayetteville, they remind us that this is the same administration that was considering furloughs and asked voters to give them the power to re-allocate park development funds.

Emily Cohen and Kate Walsh in their recent article Invisible Ink in Teacher Contracts discuss how state law limits  reform efforts that target the teaching profession. Specifically, state law often draws narrow bounds that dictate what is allowable for teacher evaluation, tenure, compensation, and dismissal. Cohen and Walsh say that many district leaders are surprised to find just how binding state law is.

“Across the country, many cash-strapped districts fretting over likely layoffs are eyeing seniority rules as they hammer out new contracts. To the surprise of some district superintendents, contract negotiations are not likely to offer much relief. In fact, when it comes to seniority rules, and many other core aspects of teachers’ employment, the contract is not the problem. State law is.”

The article is a good read that does a good job describing why teachers unions are so successful pushing legislation that benefits their members strengthens the union.

Rick Hess has a blog post today discussing the article. Here are a few of his thoughts.

They tell a compelling story. Indeed, it’s consistent with much recent work on collective bargaining (including the 2008 study The Leadership Limbo that I authored with Coby Loup), which points out that contracts are frequently less constricting than reputed–but that state and federal requirements, along with timidity and a lack of imagination on the part of district leaders, have contributed to a culture of management passivity. Cohen and Walsh point out that it is state law which drives tenure policy and which frequently mandates much of the anachronistic step-and-lane pay schedule as well as the restrictions on teacher evaluation.

Cohen and Walsh conclude their article on a positive note.

For state superintendents and legislatures, being on the side of reform is no longer such lonely ground on which to stand. They are backed by a growing legion of education advocacy organizations that are proving to be a forceful—and politically savvy—counterweight to the unions. The question is whether states will remain emboldened over the long haul or whether they will back down in the face of union opposition. But given the spate of state reforms this past spring, the future looks considerably more optimistic than even a year ago. State involvement promises to raise standards for the teaching profession to a degree that would be impossible for districts at the bargaining table.

Their conclusion seems to fit nicely with Jay Greene’s blog post a couple of days ago. Jay made the argument that reform is easier in periods of austerity. It could be a very interesting time to be in the education policy business.

But there is a silver lining to this very dire situation:  tight budgets improve the odds for serious education reform.  Traditionally, education reform has been “purchased” with big spending increases for traditional education interests.  The DC voucher program was won only after promising to pour even more millions into the traditional public schools than were poured into vouchers.  Merit pay in Denver was only won after a huge increase in education spending and salaries.

Unfortunately, the price of reform has almost always been too high.  Public schools could almost always get a ton more money without having to make any concessions to reform, so it would take truck-loads of money to get public schools to grudgingly tolerate even the weakest reform.

Those days are over and the price of reform has just come down a lot.

On July 14, Diane Ravitch wrote this:

La. students with vouchers do worse than peers in regular schools: http://tinyurl.com/347yht5. The panacea that never works, never dies.

Leave aside the uninformed claim that vouchers never work (in fact, they improve graduation rates, force public schools to improve, and improve test scores at least some of the time).

Has Ravitch found any actual evidence that Louisiana students are being harmed by vouchers? No.

Consider who receives vouchers in Louisiana. The program is limited to families with incomes under 250% of the poverty line — that is, students who tend to be poorer. On top of that, students must have attended “a public school during the 2009-2010 school year that is labeled academically unacceptable by the State.”

In other words, the voucher program is limited to students with lower incomes who attended failing public schools.

Now, as described in the EdWeek article that Ravitch so credulously cites, a former insurance executive and state board of education member named Leslie Jacobs came up with a comparison of voucher students and public school students. As far as I can tell, that comparison is available only in a blog post:

In the 2009-10 school year, 1113 children in grades K-4 received vouchers to attend one of the 32 participating non-public schools. Unfortunately, looking at the spring 2010 test scores, voucher students performed much worse than students in the New Orleans RSD – both its traditionally run public schools and public charter schools.

. . . .

Analysis

The performance of students enrolled in the voucher program raises serious concerns. While Louisiana’s proficiency goal is for all students to be Basic and above, in the voucher schools, only 35% of 3rd graders and 29% of 4th graders earned scores indicating they are grade level proficient in reading. Compare that to the RSD charters, where 54% of 3rd graders and 58% of 4th graders scored Basic and above. In fact, in English 4th grade students enrolled in the RSD charter schools outperformed students attending voucher schools by 2 to 1.

That’s the full extent of the “analysis” section. Evidently, all that Ms. Jacobs did was compare the raw average scores of voucher students to those of New Orleans public school students as a whole. Needless to say, this “analysis” is worthless — she’s comparing poorer students from failing public schools to everyone else. It’s unsurprising that the former might not be doing quite as well. Such an apples-to-oranges comparison tells us nothing about the performance of voucher-receiving private schools.

It’s a shame that Ravitch would treat this comparison with such gullibility while refusing to acknowledge the highly rigorous research done on vouchers.

I spit my mouthful of iced-tea halfway across the room today (figuratively) when I heard that Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan wanted to give $19,000 to Terry Bradshaw and a fake news outlet so they would produce a fake news segment promoting Fayetteville.  Here’s a link to the Northwest Arkansas Times story.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Fayetteville could gain national exposure when a production crew for the show “Today In America” arrives to showcase the area’s economic development possibilities and the good qualities of living here.

But it also comes with a price tag of more than $19,000.

“Today in America” is a nationally broadcast cable program moderated by NFL icon Terry Bradshaw. It features inspirational stories from across the country centering on a range of topics such as travel and lifestyle, business or medicine.

The Fayetteville spot will be about five minutes long and will include interviews with Fayetteville leaders, according to a memo Smith sent to the City Council. The project is not a typical news feature. Instead, it’s a collaborative project between the city and “Today In America.” The city will assist in script-writing by filling out a questionnaire, and gets final edit approval, according the participation agreement document.

In the case of the local segment, the producers contacted Fayetteville officials several weeks ago to inquire about shooting the piece, said Mayor Lioneld Jordan. The production company took interest in the Fayetteville Forward economic development initiative Jordan used to ask residents what sort of community they wanted Fayetteville to be.

Lindsley Smith, the city’s communication director, said the show’s producers are also interested in taking a closer look at what contributes to what many see as Fayetteville’s high quality of life. The segment will highlight why Fayetteville is a top environment for business.

“We really want to highlight the city, and I think this will put us on the national scene,” said Jordan.”

According to the city’s agreement with “Today in America,” Fayetteville will pay $19,800 for production. The money will come from the city’s economic development fund, Jordan said.”

Is it a scam? A lot of people certainly think so.  Read for yourself.  Here’s an article from CBS Moneywatch.  Here’s an article from ripoffreport.com.  Here’s a forum of others discussing that they think it is a scam.  And apparently, the group Bradshaw is with isn’t the only outfit soliciting anyone and everyone to pay for a fake news story to promote themselves.  There’s a little industry of these players.

Of course, one might argue that if  “Today in America” actually buys some time at 3 a.m. on some lame cable channel and mentions Fayetteville a few times, then the 19k is well-spent.  Scam or no scam, our name would get out there.

Then again, is that really the demographic we should be going for?  Folks watching fake-news infomercials at 3 a.m.?  I’d rather send the money to this guy.  He says he can guarantee prosperity.

UPDATE: The Fayetteville City Council approved the infomercial.  I have a new post about this topic here.
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The Fayetteville Flyer is reporting (via TMZ) that Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder has decided to fire Jessie Lunderby.  Helder wrote a long letter that explains his reasoning.  A good amount of personal annoyance emanates from the text.  Helder also engages in some wild doublespeak about his reasoning.   Here’s an excerpt of what I am talking about:

“My decision to move on without you is not a decision to impose discipline…If I were to choose to keep you as an employee, I would go down the road of deciding whether to impose discipline.  Since I have decided to take a different path–choosing another employee–there is no reason to decide to impose discipline.  So, you may truthfully tell others that your employment termination was not a disciplinary termination.  It is a business decision…”

Uhhh, yeah.  So, in other words, I’m not going to punish you, I’m just going to fire you.  Does Helder think anyone in their right mind won’t see through that?  Seriously?

Jessie refused to sign the termination letter.

I imagine that this will be good for Jessie’s fifteen minutes of fame.  It will also be bad for Fayetteville.  We’ll will get tons of negative press as a prude little town that has no respect for free-expression.  There will likely be a lawsuit.  And I also imagine this will hurt Helder in the next election.

I guess posing nude really is worse than locking someone up for four days without food, water, or a bathroom.

Earlier we made the case (here) that changing Fayetteville’s HMR tax so it could be used for development and maintenance of parks, instead of just development of new parks, was a bad idea.   We argued that we’d rather see the money for park maintenance come from just about anywhere else before the park development fund was robbed.

Well, in what we are sure will eventually become a long list of expenses we would have preferred the city cut back on in order to maintain our parks, we begin with Bikes, Babes, and Bling.  $20,000 from the HMR tax was spent for the great festival that wasn’t.  Here’s a video of the festivities:

According to the Fayetteville Flyer, KHBS/KHOG is reporting that the “city” is estimating that the economic impact of the festival was $430,000.  They’re also asking people what their impression of the festival was.  The comments are pretty hilarious.  Read more here.

Updated for clarity.