Dana Goldstein on Obama, the Reformists, and the Teacher Quality Debate

I’m kinda late on this, but Dana Goldstein had a great post a couple weeks ago on Obama’s job-creation speech and what it signals about his education agenda. In the speech, the president called for $30 billion in federal spending to prevent teacher layoffs. Goldstein thinks that’s deceptively remarkable:

This may seem like an uncontroversial, conventional Democratic spending priority. Indeed, the 2009 stimulus and the Education Jobs Fund* also helped school districts avoid teacher layoffs.

But it's important to realize that on education, Obama has rarely sounded like a conventional Democrat. During his years in the Senate, his presidential campaign, and after he entered the White House, Obama framed his school reform agenda around the issue of teacher quality, not teacher job security. He has resisted seeing schools primarily as places of employment, and has focused instead on measuring student achievement and using the data to evaluate teachers.

…

So last week's rhetorical emphasis on saving teachers' jobs --unaccompanied by talk of "teacher quality"-- is actually something notable from Obama. It represents a messaging win for teachers' unions and for the more traditionally liberal wing of the Democratic coalition. Now the rhetoric is being echoed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on a Midwest speaking tour.

Goldstein then takes a close look at the opposite wing of the reformist movement. Most reformers, she writes, are talking about who ought to be laid off, given that budget crunches are forcing layoffs, but

What's less acknowledged is that there is a quieter conversation among reformers about reducing the size of the teaching force regardless of whether or not such a move is necessitated by budget crises. 

Goldstein quotes former NYC schools chancellor and News Corp. executive Joel Klein outlining his alarming vision for the future of American schooling:

A very different system would be empowered by technology…a huge infusion of private capital aimed at creating an entirely new delivery system. Teachers would be much fewer, but paid much more…it would be data-driven, it would be customized, it would engage kids, it would differentiate the approaches we take, and it would value human capital in a much different way

I recommend reading Goldstein’s entire post.

Overhaul of Locke Highschool not That Pricey

The New York Times reported today on the $15,000,000 Charter-based reform effort at Locke High School, in Los Angeles; but that number's not really as big as everyone thinks it is.

(You can see the original article here.)

The further you read, the mathier this post will get, so, as they say in ancient Rome, cave lector!

According to the Times article, Locke High, located in South Central LA, was a prime example of America's failing urban public schools, when it was turned over to a Charter School Group, Green Dot Public Schools, in 2008. Since taking over, Green Dot has cleaned up the school: "gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward." (The only state-test data we have for the reform effort come from the spring of '09, just a few months after Green Dot took over. Given the other data, we're likely to see much larger gains in test scores when the '09-'10 results comes in.)

The projected cost of this overhaul is $15 million over the course of a four-year transition period—which sounds like a lot at first blush. The Times article, which is entitled "School is Turned Around but Cost Gives Pause," splits its time between reporting on the changes in the school and discussing the debate over whether that price-tag is exorbitant. Let's get a little perspective on that number, though.

In America, public money is assigned to a school on a per-pupil basis: within a given school district, each public school gets a given amount of money for each pupil that attends that school. This money constitutes the school's operating budget. For Locke High, that is expected to come to about $115 million total over the course of the four-year turnaround period. The $15 million price-tag on Green Dot's turnaround effort is above and beyond the operating budget and is paid for largely by donations from private foundations.

$15 million over four years amounts to an expenditure of 13% above the regular operating budget for each of those four years. Put another way, it's an investment of $1,172 per student per year, for four years. That's a small and fairly short-term investment to turn a failing school into a good school; or, put another way, to give 3,200 students a decent education.^[1]