(Guest post by Jay Greene)

I intend to vote for the school millage increase in Fayetteville on September 21.  I know that my supporting a millage increase seems as likely as pigs flying, but both can happen — I support local taxes that are well-spent.  I also believe those Razorbacks will soar this year.

I opposed the previous millage effort, but I did so because it seemed extravagant and wasteful.  Much of the current high school is adequate and there was no need to demolish it entirely and replace it with a new Taj Mahal.  Besides, there is no evidence that fancy buildings improve education. Buildings don’t teach kids, people do.

But the voters soundly rejected the previous millage by almost 2 to 1 and the school board got the message.  They scaled back their plans, found clever ways to economize by keeping much of the current structure, and they took full advantage of federally subsidized loans.

Now the school board is asking for a more modest millage increase to take even more advantage of those federal loan plans and save $29 million in interest.  Voting for this millage is a no-brainer.  The only effect of rejecting it would be that we would pay$29 million more in interest payments on the same school construction loans we are going to take out anyway.  We’ll have to pay that $29 million someday with a larger millage increase or force $29 million in operational cuts, which could be done but certainly won’t be comfortable.

I have to confess that I hesitated for a few moments in supporting even this no-brainer.  The current school board has not earned my trust or confidence with their past bumbling on plans for the high school, their embrace of 21st Century Skills nonsense, and their phony public input cheer-leading events.  I don’t even like the name of the pro-millage group, Smart Fayetteville Committee since it is obviously manipulative and not-at-all smart to dub whatever you support “smart.”

I also have to confess that if I had my druthers we would have two, smaller high schools rather than remodeling one big one.  I would gladly pay an even higher new millage for that.  But that option is not on the table.  The school district has moved forward with its remodeling plan and now our only choice is whether to pay more or less in interest payments.  I prefer paying less in interest even if it means having a higher millage for a while.

Little news so far, but apparently 25,000 scholarships will be given out, though 54,000+ applied.  This whole thing continues to be a fiasco.  Now less than half of the applicants finally get notification, with the start of the semester only days away, and another 30,000 are left wondering what they did wrong.  I am hearing a lot of reports that most of those who did not get scholarships were non-traditional students.  Many of those I am hearing from are very good students with high GPAs.

Did all of the eligible fresh-out-of-high-school kids with measly 2.5 GPAs or those who scored a 19 on their ACT get a scholarship, while high achieving current students were left out in the cold?  I’ll say more when I manage to get all of the facts.  Right now contacting anyone at the ADHE is impossible (as it has been for months).

UPDATE: Here is a press release I got from Lawrence Graves (communications officer at the ADHE). I bolded the important parts.  Apparently, if a student currently in college was ever only a part-time student, then that student was categorized as a “non-traditional” student, even if they were full-time at the time of application.  ALL of the applicants who qualified for the scholarship got a scholarship, EXCEPT those in the non-traditional category.  I think the bottom line here is that Arkansas’ lawmakers screwed this up royally.  Students who have been part-time in the past probably need the scholarship more than those that have always been full-time.  Yet they are the ones getting short-changed.  It appears that around 33,600 applicants fell into the non-traditional category, and around 30,000 of them were denied. 

“Statement from the Director:
I’ll be working on a comprehensive overview of the lottery process including dollars and students awarded.  Here is some preliminary information:

We are glad to respond to specific questions and inquiries from the scholarship applicants if they have concerns.   If an error has been made, we will rectify the situation. There are a lot of “moving parts” within the lottery act and related scholarship policies.  We have not had time to quantify all of the reasons students were declined but many applicants who thought they would be “current achiever” students actually met the definition of “Nontraditional student” because they did not earn 12 hours or more for each of the semesters they were in college since high school.  Failing to be considered in the current achiever category is the biggest surprise and frustration.

We anticipated that there would be about 30,000 students who would not receive the scholarship.  There was never enough funds to fund all 53,000 applicants. The amount that are currently funded are relatively close to our budgeted numbers, although the number of students in the different categories are somewhat different than expected.   As far as when we could have made the determination of the scholarships, it could be earlier but not substantially earlier.  College students had to have their Spring semester grades sent in and from a logistical perspective they couldn’t arrive much earlier than they did (mid June).  Students attend multiple institutions and all of those transcripts must be reviewed based upon the criteria.  A College aggregate GPA had to be calculated and the number of college credits had to be counted.  A review of each semester’s attendance records had to done to determine if the student was consistently a full-time student.

Will we bring in more temporary workers earlier next year?  Yes.

Here are the good points:  There is no funding cap on traditional students (coming from high school).  EVERY STUDENT WHO MEETS THE CRITERIA WILL BE GIVEN A SCHOLARSHIP.  $41.3 million was budgeted for current achievers.  EVERY STUDENT WHO MEETS THE CRITERIA WILL BE GIVEN A SCHOLARSHIP.  $12 million was budgeted for nontraditional students.  APPROXIMATELY 3,600 STUDENTS WILL BE FUNDED.  Not all nontraditional students will be funded.  A priority/ranking system is in place:  70% closeness to degree, 20% GPA, 10% high demand field of study.

State Triples Academic Challenge Scholarships We had 54,533 applications

A total of 25,445 students will receive the Academic Challenge scholarships next year.

This will triple the amount of students receiving the academic challenge scholarship from 8,282 last year.

There are 4 types of student receiving funding:
4,906 are students who were awarded the Academic challenge in previous years.
12,389 traditional students have been offered the award

Of the 36,697 nontraditional students:
4,550 met the Current achiever definition and were offered the scholarship

3,600 will be offered the Nontraditional scholarship.

About 30,000 students will not be funded.”

Update: Brantley is still disgruntled, and he wrote an editorial that can be read here.  John Brummett, on the other hand, is making pretty good sense.   I am still wondering when board member Baker Kurrus is going to come clean and name which charter schools are counseling out poor and minority students.  I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want to shed more light on this.

*****Beginning of Original Post*****

A new organization has formed for the purpose of expanding the debate about the future of public schooling in Little Rock.  The Dem-Gaz coverage is here.  Here’s the short version:

“A coalition that includes the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce/Associated Industries of Arkansas has organized in opposition to the Little Rock School District and its legal challenge to state-approved charter schools in Pulaski County.

Randy Zook, president and chief executive officer of the chamber, sent business and community leaders an invitation Tuesday afternoon to join the recently organized “Speak Up For Schools – Better Schools for a Better Little Rock.”

“Our mission is to join parents, business leaders and concerned citizens together to help create a better and more productive learning environment for our children in order to create a better, more equipped generation of leaders for Little Rock,” the website for the coalition states.”

The group’s website has some tough words for LRSD.  They also have some data to support their claims.

Alternative coverage is here and here, courtesy of Max Brantley’s blog.  To Brantley, the website’s launch is an “attack,” an “assault,” and a declaration of “war” on LRSD from the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce “on behalf” of the “Billionaire Boys Club,” by which he means anything that could be possibly linked to, as he puts it, “the Hussman/Walton/Stephens/Murphy money pot.”

For Brantley and his loyal band of tin-foil hatted conspiracy theorists, simply calling the opposition “billionaires” is enough to dismiss their claims.   If that doesn’t work, they’ll pile on by calling them the “establishment” and referring to them as “ideologues” (as LRSD board member Baker Kurrus did).  And they’re perfectly willing to assign all sorts of crazy motives to them…claims that they want to dismantle public education and re-segregate Little Rock’s schools.  They can’t believe for a second that people with money could possibly care about education.  To them, it’s all one grand conspiracy.

I’m comfortable believing that the LRSD board members genuinely care about educating children, just as much as I believe the so-called “the Hussman/Walton/Stephens/Murphy money pot” cares about educating children.  And anyway, it would be pointless to assume otherwise.  Both sides just genuinely disagree about  how to bring about improvements.  So I’m glad the “Speak Up for Schools” group is out there, making a case for their point of view.  It would be nice if their critics would address their claims, instead of acting offended and dismissing them as part of some evil conspiracy of wealth.  It would be far more productive to focus on the issue at hand.

Also, over on Brantley’s blog, board member Baker Kurrus said that “several of the Pu. Cty. charters have a practice of counseling poor Blacks out.” I hope Mr. Kurrus plans on naming names and providing the proper officials with all of the details.

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:

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.

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.

Teachers, both in K-12 public education and at our institutions of higher education, enjoy a level of job security that simply does not exist in any other sector of the economy. The online magazine Slate has an article today that discusses the origins of teacher tenure at the K-12 level. It’s an interesting read with quite a few good links.  Here is an excerpt:

In 1909. Until the early 20^th century, teachers had few protections. According to anecdote, they were fired for flunking the children of powerful parents, holding unpopular views, or simply getting old. Politicians sometimes replaced teachers as part of the infamous spoils system. The National Education Association began pushing for tenure in 1887, as a means of ensuring that employment decisions were based on merit rather than politics. Tenure also protected minority teachers in an era of weak civil rights law. But even then, school administrators worried that such a system might destroy “the important incentive to effort which makes retention in service depend upon usefulness and ability.” New Jersey went ahead and passed the first tenure law for experienced public school teachers in 1909, followed by Montana in 1913, Massachusetts in 1914, and New York in 1917. (America’s most famous fired teacher, John Scopes, wasn’t protected by tenure. In 1925, Tennessee hadn’t yet adopted the system. Scopes was too green to have tenure, anyway. He was in his first year when he started teaching evolution.) Today, every state has some form of tenure.

Economists have long disliked strong job protections because they distort peoples’ effort, create a rigid labor market that is enormously inefficient, and make it difficult for institutions to remove their worst performers. Freakonomics author and University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt lays out the case for the ellimination of tenure on his blog here and here.

It would seem that the leaders of the Democratic Party have been listening. The Obama administration has supported tenure reform as part of its education initiatives while poring an unprecedented amount of money into public education. Unsurprisingly the leaders of the teaches unions, being the membership maximizers that they are, have not taken kindly to the suggestion of tenure reform. A recent New York Times article highlighted the snubbing of the administration at the recent union conventions. Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, is quoted as having told attendees, “Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced.” I suppose one out of three aint bad.

The unions are fighting hard to best the Obama administration on their own turf. They have Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin doing their bidding. Obey pushed a bill through the House last week that redirects money away from the administration’s reform oriented priorities and toward maintaining the status quo. Several democratic senators are fighting back. I’m not sure who will win this particular fight, but I am sure that the unions will continue to fight reform tooth and nail. And, this is a fight that is sure to damage the unions reputation and lessen their political influence along the way.

The bottom line, tenure as we know it is on its way out, and the teachers unions in their tone deaf obstinance are moving ever closer to irrelevance. The times they are a changin’.

The Arkansas Department of Education released the End-of-Course exam results for the 2009-2010 school year today. You can find the press release here and the data here. And, here are a few highlights from the release.

Results from the state’s 2010 End-of-Course exams show gains over last year in algebra I and geometry achievement levels for public school students, but they reveal a decline in biology scores.

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The algebra I and geometry End-of-Course exams are used in the calculations to identify schools in need of improvement under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind). A score of “proficient” – which is higher than a score of “pass” — must be attained under the federal requirements.

On the algebra I End-of-Course Exam, 73 percent scored proficient or higher in January and 76 percent did so in April

On geometry, 76 percent scored proficient or higher in January and 69 percent did in April

On biology, 40 percent scored proficient or higher in January and 36 percent did in April.

“The good news is more than nine out of ten students passed this test the first time around,” said Tom W. Kimbrell, Arkansas commissioner of education, “but the great news is that three out of four are mastering algebra at a proficient level.”