The very talented Justin Cohen runs the Office of Portfolio Management for the District of Columbia Public Schools under D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee…in other words, he’s a big gun on the D.C. school scene.  

The other day, while on an otherwise uneventful boat trip, Cohen’s vessel was boarded by the U.S Coast Guard for a routine safety search, most  likely because in that outfit and shades, Cohen gives off the vibe of an international fugitive or trafficker rather than a school official.   Anyway, caption this photo and the best caption gets a free lunch.

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez checks-in on Locke High School under its new management.  Background posts here.

Per last week’s item on big bus, now there are propane buses rolling off the assembly lines….Meanwhile, Greg Forster wants more snark, more vouchers, less bus.

With everything going on in D.C. there has been some speculation about who is handling communications for D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee.   Turns out it’s United States Senator Joe Lieberman.

Fathers don’t let your daughters grow-up to be JMU undergraduates…says USAT’s Richard Whitmire.

So there is now some back and forth about the recent Maryland test scores that is reminiscent of the back and forth about the New York test scores (speaking of which, they’re still arguing about New York City down below).    Again, transparency would really help here.

But this raises a bigger question: Let’s assume for a moment that Maryland, New York state, and a host of other places have all gamed their scores.  And let’s assume that states regularly try to game the system to make themselves look better.   Can someone explain exactly how a national, federal, or “American” in the new parlance, test will be any different?  If indeed there is a political pathology out there to make schools look better, regardless of whether they are better, a proposition that seems pretty spot on to me, then how are the politics somehow so radically different at the national level?  National test proponents have never really answered this question except to point to the NAEP.  But, the NAEP is a no-stakes test right now so it really doesn’t make the point.

Charlie Rose interviews Michelle Rhee as part of his ongoing series with people from the ed world.  Couple of previous ones here.

Clearly George Miller invited the wrong school superintendents to Washington!

Janet Hansen turns in a spectacular must-read about teacher pensions (pdf).  Background posts here.

In 2006 we saw Doug Levin’s Alaska salmon.   Today Dutko’s Ben Wallerstein, who represents a variety of education clients and is one of education’s doers and all around good guys, sends along this photo from a recent Alaska trip.

A few quick reactions to Senator McCain’s education speech and new agenda.  Punchline:  Maybe Chad Aldeman is advising him after all?   Nothing in here is going to ignite a Whitmiresque fantasy.  Nothing in here will fire up McCain’s base but it’s not a bold enough play to either pull a Bush-like repositioning with suburban women or get centrists excited.  And nothing here is going to force Senator Obama’s hand.  But he was at the NAACP?  Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Overall, there does seem to be an effort at hand-forcing but if this campaign turns into a debate about vouchers please just shoot me now.  I’d prefer a debate that ignores education than that tired fight again.   Besides, everyone knows that performance-pay is the new vouchers anyway.  And, although it seems that McCain is trying to lay a bear trap for Senator Obama around the voucher issue, I’ve always thought that for a bear trap to work you needed a, you know, bear.   The D.C. voucher program hardly seems likely to be a big issue during the fall campaign and is more an ‘09 issue, so where’s the bear?  Alternatively, if he’s trying to trip up Senator Obama once he’s President Obama, then that’s a novel campaign strategy…But I could be wrong on this…

But there is a bigger disconnect here:  Where’s the big agenda and the resources?  I’m hardly a throw money at the problem kind of guy, but big ideas do often have a commensurate price tag.   Sara Mead’s bummed that McCain didn’t talk about pre-kindergarten education.   Me too especially because pre-k is exactly the kind of public-private choice driven system Republicans claim to like so much.  But I’m even more disappointed that while overall McCain says we need to get past conventional thinking on this issue, something I agree with wholeheartedly, he doesn’t provide a roadmap or the resources to do that.  

I don’t disagree with some of his ideas (several of which seem familiar…) and there is some good stuff in there but collectively they’re more a laundry list than any sort of comprehensive set of ideas to seriously change American education and without serious resources attached to them they’re not going to leverage real change anyway.  Meanwhile, McCain wants to make a big bet on virtual education with a proposal that will make some of the vendors swoon, but it’s unclear from what he laid out if he understands that the virtual education problem is at least as much one of content as infrastructure.   There is a pretty big gap between what teachers are seeing with this stuff and what the enthusiasts are promising…Likewise, he’s right to want to add more pluralism to teacher training but this package needs more dollars and more ambition on that front.

And, during Q & A in front of the NAACP he seemed to commit to “fully funding” No Child Left Behind, something dramatically at odds with his earlier pledges to rein in federal spending and balance the budget by 2013.   Lest it be considered a flip flop, his aides cleaned that up afterwards but it’s illustrative of what seems to be something of a disjointed approach to education policymaking over there.  It’s hard to see what the coherent whole is and hard to tell if Senator McCain cares enough to really develop one.  The rhetoric was mostly casting the issue in the negative, what others had done wrong etc…there was no simple mission statement that under his leadership x or y would happen on education or some set of first principles.    And the stuff on faraway Washington officials is as tired as it gets, I’ve seen that movie…Especially in front of the NAACP he could have laid out a bigger vision for what educational equity looks like and in the process perhaps stimulated more of an education debate in this campaign.

*In the interest of transparency as I start to write more about the campaign I should note that I’m supporting Senator Obama.   And, although in my role at Education Sector, a non-partisan 501c3 organization I’ve had contact with both campaigns around our published work and theories of action, in my free (personal and non-compensated) time I have contact with the Obama campaign on policy issues.

Walt Gardner has the standard issue schools can’t do much for poor kids op-ed in today’s CSM.  He cites Washington, D.C. as his example, focusing on the pretty modest results from the D.C. voucher program as evidence that moving kids to other, presumably better, schools doesn’t matter much.   Only one small problem with his argument:  The voucher sector is really the only part of education in D.C. you can say that about.  The public charter schools — even accounting for more than a few lousy ones in the city — are moving the ball and the good charters, of which there are many, disprove Gardner’s theory.   Meanwhile, overall, the traditional D.C. public schools, long thought unreformable are, well, improving.  These kids didn’t change income levels, diets, households, neighborhoods, parents, health care plans, or weather…yet they’re doing better because of something the, you know, schools are doing.   I’m all for tackling all those other things but let’s not sell the schools short.   (My take on the two manifestos Gardner references is here).

Local school districts are right to be freaked out by this attempt to curtail some public bus routes serving students.  But, in the forest and trees category, there is a bigger set of issues here.   In fact, shouldn’t we be going in the other direction and trying to get school districts out of the busing business altogether?   Big school districts like to boast about how they bus more passengers each day than Greyhound.   That’s true, but also sort of insane if you think about it and consider that their primary mission is teaching and learning.  

Besides, today’s buses are horrendous polluters even when greener technology is available, control over transportation means control over parental decision-making, and school districts often aren’t even very good at designing efficient transportation schemes or adapting to changing circumstances like $4 gas, which was not exactly an unforeseen issue in the transportation world…Student safety means that, especially for younger students you want to be careful about how you merge transportation schemes, but having local or regional agencies that handle transportation would pay a lot of dividends if was approached with the dual principles of being greener and more parent-and civic friendly at the front-end.

At the outset two points so my colleagues don’t tie me to a chair and throw me in a river to see if I float:  (A) The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a pretty good test and a valuable tool for analysts and (B) A lot of states do play games to make themselves look better on their state tests than they’re actually doing.  That’s because of the ongoing debate in our field between the Achievement Realists and the Public Relationists.* 

However, per the WaPo’s Maryland article today and others like it,  all that said, the NAEP is not the be all and end all of tests, no test is, and the fetish about it is getting a little out of hand.  Remember, all these standards, and the NAEP operates within a framework, too, are human constructions.  There is no stone tablet somewhere that says what a student should know or be able to do in, say, 5th grade math.     So, healthy skepticism is always in order about what states are up to but at the same time the flashing of the NAEP as a yellow card every time a state improves its numbers is counterproductive.    There are some legitimate reasons (alignment, time lag, students clustered around proficiency benchmarks etc…) why those gains may not be reflected on the NAEP in the short term.

*PS–Today’s politics have the Public Relationists in a bit of a bind.  Say schools are doing better and the Bush Administration gets some reflected credit, say they’re not and you undermine the whole Public Relationist strategy.

Parroting a bit of conventional wisdom that turns up in anti-reform circles from time to time, serial commenter John Thompson noted the other day that, “if scores go up for low-income students during this economy, we know those numbers are bogus. Even if classroom instruction was becoming more effective at an optimum rate, we humans don’t have the power to outrace the decline that inevitably follows economic downturns. It is not criticism of educators or any policy. It is no criticism of the best Olympic runner to say that he or she can’t win the Kentucky Derby.”

Ssshhh…nobody tell Maryland the kids can’t learn if the Dow is under 11K!

Over at Q&E Erin Dillon makes a great point about research that is relevant to this debate between Jay Greene and Eduwonkette — basically that it’s hard as hell to access a lot of the peer-reviewed journal research.   I made a similar point a while ago in terms of getting more work from academia into the policy debates.   But, while Erin is right and it’s a problem, it’s also a good illustration of how different the incentives are inside and outside of academia in terms of what’s recognized and rewarded.  Things work the way they do for a reason.

Update:  Commenter Meadowlark makes an interesting point below, what about libraries?   It’s a fair question and raises, I think, three issues.   First, in the case of federal elected policymakers they do have access to a great library and really strong analysts via the Library of Congress and the Congresssional Research Service.  So they’re getting access to current literature, usually via synthesis, that way.   Second, in the case of think tanks, research organizations, and academia, there is a lot of variance in the extent to which various analysts and writers keep up with the literature in a particular field or sub-field.   But, although the cliche is that people will talk about anything, if you actually were to do a content analysis you’d find that most influential people stick pretty close to their knitting because it’s hard to really stay current and effective on more than a handful of issues.  And while contra Jay Greene I don’t think our information market works especially well in the short term, it does seem to reward that approach over time.  Third, to Meadowlark’s main point that people should go to the library, that’s certainly true as a general principle.  Still, in practice we should also be cognizant that there is a lot of information coming at policymakers these days through various means.  So, if people want their ideas in that mix, they have to affirmatively make that happen by getting them out from behind firewalls and making them accessible both in form and content.   And per my original post above, the incentives in academia still generally work against both of those things right now in addition to the more basic tension between journalism, public affairs, etc…and academic research.

Per this debate with Jay Greene, anonymous Education Week blogger Eduwonkette now says there is a problem with asymmetric information in the education information marketplace after previously decrying the lack of transparency in the field….In other news, town arsonist says “someone ought to do something about all these fires!”

Education Week’s David Hoff smells a lot of news in new AFT Prez Randi Weingarten’s pushback on NCLB…but I’m not sure it is especially newsy (hell, the AFT started a blog about this…) although the rhetoric is sharper than in the past but that’s more a function of the times, not The Times…okay maybe a little bit of that, too.  Anyway, regardless, it’s smart internal politics on Weingarten’s part, she’s going to have to manage the political challenges of reform deftly.  And because the basic contours of No Child Left Behind reauthorization are relatively clear —  there is a fair amount of path dependency in federal education policy – this is sort of a freebie.

Per this whole is it schools or is it society debate, studies like this new one from Andrew Zau and Julian Betts (pdf) are pretty depressing.   They show that it’s possible at a pretty early point in a child’s schooling experience to see what their trajectory is.   The don’t blame the schools crowd would have a stronger case if, armed with this information, states and schools were seriously crafting interventions to get these kids back on track.  But no.  Instead, perversely, they often get the least.

In fact, although we have much more data than ever before and a few states are experimenting with “early warning systems” or catch up programs in high school (see this report (pdf) and this one for some background), no state has a robust system to really reach these students and their families.  Creating such a system, using data, should be at the top of every governor’s education to do list and with today’s technology there are a variety of ways to do it and communicate with parents*.   It would help turn accountability from being a reactive proposition to a proactive one.  And, taking it a step further, there is no reason why you couldn’t build elements of this into a school accountability system, too.

*Who are also constituents, this is smart politics, too.

The queue of stuff that people have sent and I’ve been meaning to post is way out of hand as often happens when I’m travelling a lot.  Here’s a lot of links worth checking out, with a few treats buried in there.  First the news.

Something Happening Here:  From Denver, The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News report on yesterday’s big-hitter presser on education reform and local education player Alan Gottlieb offers his take.  Sam Dillon previews Randi Weingarten’s coronation in The Times.   But Sam falls for some spin when he writes:

Another group, headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of New York, issued a manifesto last month urging the nation to redouble its efforts to close the achievement gap separating poor students from affluent ones and blaming “teachers’ contracts” for keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.

Actually, the document blames teachers contracts and state policies for some of the problems, that’s nuance that matters.

Meanwhile Jonathan Alter calls for real reform in Newsweek and Matt Miller does the same in the WSJ. 

Weingarten has positioned herself as the go-to reformer in the teachers’ union community.  In public and private Eli Broad calls her the next Al Shanker all the time.   But, she needs to be careful here because (a) people are watching all those markers she’d laid down and (b) Alter, Whitmire, Miller, etc…etc…etc…are a pretty good reflection of the zeitgeist out there right now…I remain optimistic about her tenure but it’s going to be a real leadership challenge.

Along those lines, with IBM’s Ted Hoff, TNTP’s Tim Daly and I presented to the governors at the National Governors Association this weekend about human capital policy and actionable policy ideas that are out there today, there is a lot of interest in this area and a sense that we need to take bolder action.  But, what I’m really left wondering about from the meeting is whose idea it was to book Motley Crue and the nation’s governors into the same hotel…

Not quite related, but speaking of New York, since we sorta were, they’re still debating down below over what has/has not happened there during the last eight years.

Reading War:  They’re debating reading/Reading First over at USAT  (ed board here and opposing view here) and Tim Shanahan weighs-in here.

Ad War:  More ads on education coming and again highlighting competitiveness.   On the merits I think the competitiveness issue is overblown, it’s a longer term issue and a more subtle one.   But I am also unconvinced that highlighting it is such a smart political strategy in terms of generating support for school reform.   Civil rights, fairness, quality and customization, and using public money as effectively as possible strike me as more salient issues.

Good Links:   The new American Educator takes a look at English-language learners, it’s amazing that with the demographic changes we know are coming there is still so little capacity to effectively educate these children…And it includes another winner by the invaluable Dan Willingham.   Plus the requisite Shanker fetishizing.

End of last week I was in Aspen for some meetings and Scott Page spoke.  You want to check this guy out, amazing.  

CBS News recently produced a three-parter on education.   Orwell student tracking device here, D.C.’s Michelle Rhee here, and single-gender here.  Meanwhile, John Walsh is hosting an online special about keeping kids safe online.

US News is considering changing how they rank law schools and US News’ Ramirez looks at dual enrollment.

Teacher Paul Barnwell has launched an interesting website “Questions for Schools.”   Chris Osborne wants to help you track your grades better.   Matt Ladner goes all bigger and bolder, and Advance Illinois needs a director of policy.

If you only read one article on education policy today, you can’t do much better than this one from Slate.

The other day I lamented the lack of a clear piece explaining the teacher pay debate in Denver.   Too fast! Happily, today, on my hotel doorstep (I’ve been in CO for a few days) was the Rocky Mountain News with a long piece with a lot of information.   The print edition has even more information than the online version.

Richard Whitmire says the NEA is on the wrong side of history in this Politico op-ed that has people chattering…

As promised, below is the debate between Chris Cerf of the NYC Department of Education and Sol Stern about what’s happening with test scores and education in Gotham.   Enjoy.

Dear Sol:

It seems that when the press needs to find a negative voice about New York City schools, you have become a pundit of choice. Your writings often echo the same themes. I agree that our record of progress is not without setbacks and I’m all for balanced reporting, but your persistently one-sided perspective and refusal to recognize the improved outcomes of students during the past six years is over the top.

Consider what we’ve accomplished in the six years since Mayor Bloomberg won control of the school system:

• Our students are making substantial, consistent progress in both math and reading. Since the start of the administration, the percentage of students in grades 3-8 meeting or exceeding standards in math has risen 37 percentage points. In reading, we’ve seen an 18.3 point gain. And we have been steadily closing the gap with the rest of the state – an indicator that controls for any fluctuations in the difficulty of the tests from year to year. In 4^th grade, the gap separating the City from the rest of the State has narrowed 18 points in math and 8.4 points in reading since 2002. In 8^th grade, the gap has narrowed 11.7 points in math and 2.7 points in reading.
• We are narrowing the racial achievement gap. Since 2002, the gap between African American students and their White peers has narrowed 12.5 percentage points in math and 6.4 percentage points in reading. The gap between Hispanic students and their White peers has narrowed 13.2 points in math and 3.8 points in reading.
• New York City’s graduation rate has risen 9 percentage points between 2002 and 2006 (the most recent year reported) and 6 percentage points between 2004 and 2006, whether you use the City’s or the State’s method of calculating it. By contrast, the graduation rate rose just one-tenth of one percentage point in the entire decade before 2002.
• We have created the most sophisticated accountability system in the country. Every school received a letter grade (A-F) this year based heavily on the progress of individual students from year to year. At the same time, we’ve empowered principals with the authority they need to help their students succeed. We’ve also given them the resources they need by redirecting millions of dollars from the bureaucracy to schools and creating a fairer, more transparent method of school funding.
• We’ve created new educational options for students. By the start of the 2008-09 school year, we will have opened 284 small schools and 78 charter schools during the course of this administration. Those schools are soaring.
• We’ve raised teacher salaries by 43% since 2002 and created innovative incentive programs to help us attract and retain excellent teachers, including one that will reward teachers whose schools meet student achievement targets. 
• New York City won the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, the nation’s most prestigious education prize. According to the Broad Foundation, New York City is a “model of successful urban district school reform.”

To be sure, the gradient – while steeply up – experiences an occasional plateau. We are not making progress in 8^th grade reading at the same rate as we are for younger students. You point, correctly, to evidence of that on the most recent NAEP. But here’s what you don’t report about the NAEP:

·         The percentage of New York City 4^th graders scoring at or above basic has risen 12 percentage points in math since 2003. Our 4^th graders are now just 2 percentage points behind the national average in math.

·         Our African American 4^th graders have made even more impressive gains: 14 points in math since 2003 and 14 percentage points in reading since 2002. They are achieving at higher levels than their peers in large central cities and the nation as a whole, and they are first in reading and second in math among their peers in large urban districts.

·         Because of a state change in testing requirements, the number of 4^th grade ELLs taking the NAEP nearly doubled between test administrations. Normalizing for that change, reading scores increased.

·         While the NAEP is important evidence of progress, it is not “high stakes,” not based on state standards, and given to a comparatively small sample. At minimum, the significance of the NAEP needs to be considered in the larger context of state tests, which are high-stakes and are taken by all.

You frequently argue that the Mayor and Chancellor should not be given credit for the growth in achievement in their first year. To the contrary, they instituted important changes during that year. Obviously what happened in the past affected the results, just as our work will affect the results of the next chancellor, but that first year was on our watch. Had scores gone down, can there be any doubt that you would have attributed the decline to the Mayor and Chancellor? Moreover, our progress remains striking even if you measure from 2003. Indeed, the Broad Prize was based on our performance between 2003 and 2006, and the pace of our improvement has continued since then.

Finally – and I have to admit, this is my personal favorite – last month the State announced record gains for NYC and very strong gains across the state. By virtually every measure, this was a strong year for New York’s schools. Your response? The results are too good to be believed (a point you will need to take up with Commissioner Mills and the psychometricians who validated the test to confirm its year-to-year reliability).

Our schools today are at an entirely different level than they were in 2002. Achievement is way up, tens of thousands of students are on track to graduate who wouldn’t have been six years ago, and we have put in place a body or reforms that will continue the progress. This is a record that should give any objective education reformer a reason to smile.

Best regards,

Chris Cerf

Deputy Chancellor

Dear Chris,

            When former businessman Michael Bloomberg took control of New York City’s public schools in June, 1992 he pledged to give the taxpayers a bigger bang for their education bucks. And in a January, 2003 speech that introduced his new reforms, Mayor Bloomberg promised that student achievement would improve without even having to spend more money on the schools.

 There’s now enough data to judge whether the mayor has delivered on those promises. On the spending side of the ledger the gains have certainly been historic. In six years the city’s education budget has soared from $12.7 billion to $21 billion, even as student enrollment declined by 5%. Per-pupil expenditures are over $20,000 and closing in on wealthy suburban districts. The extra $8 billion has paid for across-the-board pay raises of 43% for teachers, even bigger increases for administrators and central staff, the hiring of thousands of extra teachers (producing a 12 to 1 student/teacher ratio) and the equivalent of 15 extra days of school.

The additional funding also underwrites the biggest public relations and marketing operation in the history of public education. The education department’s press office has 15 full time employees, compared to 3 under the previous administration and 8 or 9 in the U.S. Department of Education’s press office. But that’s apparently not enough to get Mayor Bloomberg’s message out. So last year he recruited some of his wealthy friends to underwrite a multi-million dollar media campaign trumpeting his administration’s education achievements. The donations are passed through the Fund for Public Schools, controlled by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The ad campaign has cost $3.5 million so far, and a new TV and radio spot pronouncing that the latest gains in test scores are “amazing” will cost another million dollars.

            Contrary to the mayor’s public relations blitz, however, it is hard to find reliable evidence of dramatic improvements in student achievement. According to the federal NAEP tests — regarded by education scholars as “the nation’s report card” — city students had no statistically significant gains from 2003-2007 in fourth and eighth grade reading and eighth grade math, and modest improvements in fourth grade math. The lack of progress in three out of four of the NAEP benchmark tests was true for white, black, Asian and Hispanic students.

             Stung by these disappointing results the Bloomberg PR machine has tried to muddy the waters about NAEP as a valid assessment tool. But even the state report card preferred by the administration reveals a yawning gap between what Mayor Bloomberg promised and what has been delivered. In his recent press conference claiming tremendous progress on the state tests, Bloomberg distributed charts showing that the percentage of city students achieving proficiency since 2002 rose by 27.7 points in fourth grade math; 29.8 points in eighth grade math; 14.8 points in fourth grade reading; 13.5 points in eighth  grade reading. The charts are surely impressive, except that they are based on a statistical sleight of hand. Mayor Bloomberg has appropriated outsized one year gains that occurred in all four tests between 2002-2003. Those gains should be credited to the previous education administration.

            Here’s why: Bloomberg took office on January 1, 2002, but didn’t win control of the schools until June 12th of that year. Chancellor Klein wasn’t appointed until August, and then spent the rest of the 2002 calendar year creating task forces to advise the new administration on how to reform the schools. By the time the administration announced its restructuring plans early in 2003, the students were taking the state’s 2003 tests. For half of the 12 month period between the 2002 and the 2003 state tests the schools were under the direction of Chancellor Harold Levy. For the rest of that period the system was still operating under the old structure and with the same curriculum. In fact, the Bloomberg reforms were not put into place until September, 2003.

            After subtracting the 2002-2003 gains from Bloomberg’s column the actual improvements on the state tests over the next five years look considerably less robust — a 13 point gain in fourth grade math, 25 points in eighth grade math (fueled by a spectacular one year gain throughout the state in 2008) 9 points in fourth grade reading, and 10.5 points in eighth grade reading. The city’s previous two education administrations actually had higher percentage gains in fourth grade reading and fourth grade math. Moreover, the city’s test score improvements are no larger than those achieved in school districts around the state that haven’t adopted the Bloomberg reforms.

            Bloomberg’s failure to raise reading achievement in the early grades is particularly unsettling, since proficiency in reading is the motor that drives children’s future academic progress. The single biggest problem besetting urban school districts is dismally low reading outcomes. Leave aside the flat NAEP scores during the Bloomberg years. Even on state tests driven by NCLB pressures to push children across lowered proficiency barriers, the city’s average improvement in fourth and eighth grade reading has barely reached 2 percentage points per year since the mayor announced his reforms. This failure to make progress in reading is likely due to the wrong turn taken by Chancellor Klein in September 2003, when he imposed an unproven reading program called Balanced Literacy on all schools.  

            It has been shocking to me that so many business leaders and education reformers have accepted these mediocre outcomes as a reasonable return on the Bloomberg administration’s enormous financial investment in the schools. It’s even more astonishing that, based on this record, the Bloomberg approach is being widely touted as the answer for other troubled inner city school districts. It’s understandable that some reformers want to believe in the power of Bloomberg’s market incentives to improve schools. But at some point the children who are being told they are making “amazing” progress by the Bloomberg spin machine are likely to run into an academic brick wall. Those education reformers who blindly accepted the spin on test scores will then also have lost credibility.

Sol Stern

Chad Aldeman is right about where it looks, based on this AP story, that McCain is going on education, but I don’t think that Chad would make a very good McCain advisor based on the options he lays out.  There is a fourth option for the McCain campaign beside the three that Chad offers up:  McCain could actually be the kind of conservative who champions powerful national institutions and he could try to improve the public schools with a bold agenda.   I get the hostility that real anti-government conservatives have toward public schools but have never understood why more mainstream conservatives don’t seize the mantle of school reform.  

Besides, although I want to see Senator Obama win the election, such a posture from McCain would at least make our issue more interesting than a bunch of warmed over GOP golden oldies will…

Sara Carr turns-in a three part series inside the schools there.

Per the whole dueling manifesto issue, Rick Kahlenberg weighs-in with a TAP article well-worth your time.   He provides some interesting Al Sharpton - Al Shanker context (although Sharpton has worked frequently with teachers’ unions over the years) and puts forward his path through.

In the course of a back and forth with Eduwonkette, Jay Greene produces a useful post on this whole issue of the politics of information.  I’ve blogged on the more general issues surrounding this and wrote an article for PDK on the social science - journalism tension, which, as Jay notes, is only more acute in the blogosphere.    But, I think his assertion that, “we have a caveat emptor market of ideas that generally works pretty well” is off-base.   Not infrequently newspapers get snookered on research and most consumers of this information lack the technical skills to evaluate much of the work for themselves.   As education research has become more quantitative — a good thing — it’s also become less accessible and there is, I’d argue, more an asymmetry to the information market out there than an fully functioning marketplace of ideas right now.  In terms of remedies there is no substitute for smart consumption of information and research, but we’re not there yet as a field.