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Education policies cannot be successful if school districts are required to implement those policies in ineffective ways. While education policymakers passionately discuss the merits or flaws of big picture policy ideas, once policies actually make it into law few look back to see how the policies work in day-to-day practice. This is unfortunate, because overly burdensome or complicated administrative requirements can trip up policy goals.

"I'm a big fan of surveys of teachers' opinions of education policy, not only because of educators' valuable policy-relevant knowledge, but also because their views are sometimes misrepresented or disregarded in our public discourse. For instance, the diverse set of ideas that might be loosely characterized as "market-based reform" faces a bit of tension when it comes to teacher support. Without question, some teachers support the more controversial market-based policy ideas, such as pay and evaluations based substantially on test scores, but most do not. The relatively low levels of teacher endorsement don't necessarily mean these ideas are "bad," and much of the disagreement is less about the desirability of general policies (e.g., new teacher evaluations) than the specifics (e.g., the measures that comprise those evaluations). In any case, it's a somewhat awkward juxtaposition: A focus on "respecting and elevating the teaching profession" by means of policies that most teachers do not like."

"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as cost-effective as other reforms. However, this conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report's estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available. "

"Given the budgetary strain that school districts have been facing in recent years and the impetus to increase the number of charter schools, concerns about the fiscal impacts of charter schools are more salient than ever. However, very little research has addressed this issue. Using the city school districts of Albany and Buffalo in New York, this brief addresses this gap in the literature by demonstrating how fiscal impacts on local school districts can be estimated and offering a way to conceptualize fiscal impacts that is useful for framing charter school policy objectives. We find that charter schools have had negative fiscal impacts on these two school districts, and argue that there are two reasons for these impacts. First, operating two systems of public schools under separate governance arrangements can create excess costs. Second, charter school financing policies can distribute resources to or away from districts. We argue that charter schools policies should seek to minimize any avoidable excess costs created by charter schools and ensure that the burden of any unavoidable excess costs is equitably distributed across traditional public schools, charter schools, and the state. We offer concrete policy recommendations that may help to achieve these objectives."

The word "policy" makes us think of politicians and bureaucrats. But what happens when powerful policy-makers aren't elected or appointed? Today, billionaires are shaping education policy in the United States. Buying political influence--even legally--feels dirty, so let me try again: Philanthropists are saving our schools! See what happened when I replaced "political influence" with "philanthropy"?

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school than those from more advantaged families. Because these policy initiatives do not directly address the educational  challenges experienced by disadvantaged students, they have contributed little -- and are not likely to contribute much  in the future -- to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm. Addressing the educational challenges faced by children from disadvantaged families will require a broader and bolder approach to education policy than the recent efforts to reform schools.

While our society is more diverse than ever before, schools are more segregated today than they were 30 years ago. School choice policies that allow children to enroll in schools outside of their neighborhood have the potential to reduce segregation and many of the inequities that flow from that segregation. Yet some of the nation's most segregated K-12 schools are public charter schools. A new report from the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), Chartering Equity: Using Charter School Legislation and Policy to Advance Equal Educational Opportunity, written and researched by Julie F. Mead of the University of Wisconsin and Preston C. Green III of Penn State, offers guidance on how charter school policies can best be shaped to promote equity goals.

"...For those involved in policy matters, this book will, if you let it, unsettle you. Most involved in policy are addressing matters around the edges, even if they do confront matters of poverty and background. Perhaps you will find yourself disagreeing with some of what the authors present. Fair enough, but can you then as a reader and a policy maker come up with reasons for not addressing the issues with which they challenge you? Do not all of us-teachers, parents, administrators, policy makers-owe our children, our students, a willingness to think beyond our current practices so that we can do the best job possible of preparing them to take responsibility for the world which we will leave them?..."

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg's education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools, to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not only for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.

Anyone who wants to start a charter school must of course receive permission, and there are laws and policies governing how such permission is granted. In some states, multiple entities (mostly districts) serve as charter authorizers, whereas in others, there is only one or very few. For example, in California there are almost 300 entities that can authorize schools, almost all of them school districts. In contrast, in Arizona, a state board makes all the decisions. The conventional wisdom among many charter advocates is that the performance of charter schools depends a great deal on the "quality" of authorization policies - how those who grant (or don't renew) charters make their decisions. This is often the response when supporters are confronted with the fact that charter results are varied but tend to be, on average, no better or worse than those of regular public schools. They argue that some authorization policies are better than others, i.e., bad processes allow some poorly-designed schools start, while failing to close others. This argument makes sense on the surface, but there seems to be scant evidence on whether and how authorization policies influence charter performance. From that perspective, the authorizer argument might seem a bit like tautology - i.e., there are bad schools because authorizers allow bad schools to open, and fail to close them. As I am not particularly well-versed in this area, I thought I would look into this a little bit.

This report takes a closer look at the powerful forces behind the Committee and their playbook for "saving" New York. The Committee's backers are primarily big business interests, billionaires, and other leading lights of New York State's "one percent." They played a key role in crashing New York's economy through their own style of gambling, won billions in government bailouts, but now insist on "fiscal responsibility" for the rest of the state. Though the Committee frames its agenda as altruistic and public-minded, its backers stand to profit substantially from the policies for which it advocates. These policy payoffs include not just casino gambling legalization, but pension reform, new and continued corporate tax loopholes, and favorable development policies.

Over the past two decades, state and federal education policies have tried to hold schools more accountable for educating their students. A common criticism of these policies is that they may induce schools to "game the system" with strategies such as excluding certain types of students from computation of school average test scores. In this post, based on our recent New York Fed staff report, "Vouchers, Responses, and the Test Taking Population: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida," we investigate whether Florida schools resorted to such strategic behavior in response to a voucher program. We find some evidence that Florida's schools strategically reclassified weak students into exempt categories, and we draw some lessons that are applicable to New York City's education policies.

Among my son's favorite books are the ones in Richard Scarry's Busytown series. In What Do People Do All Day?, Able Baker Charlie puts too much yeast in the dough, resulting in a gigantic, explosive loaf of bread that the bakers (and Lowly Worm) need to eat their way out of. The opposite problem -- a lack of yeast -- is present in Michelle Rhee's recent op-ed in Education Week. In it, she limits her call to "rethink" teaching policy to "how we assign, retain, evaluate, and pay educators" and to "teacher-layoff and teacher-tenure policies." (And she casts the issue of retention purely as one about so-called "last-in, first-out" employment policies rather than about school leadership, collaboration or working conditions.) The utter absence of any focus or mention of teacher development either in this op-ed or in her organization's (StudentsFirst) expansive policy agenda leaves me wondering if Rhee believes that teachers are capable of learning and improving.

A central idea in Change Matters: Critical Essays on Moving Social Justice from Theory to Policy, edited by sj Miller and David E. Kirkland, is that teaching for social justice cannot simply be an intellectual endeavor. Rather, it is a fundamentally practical action having a real and noticeable impact on the lives of children. In an era dominated by a policy discourse obsessed with testing, accountability, and even recrimination, it is refreshing to envision a different set of policy questions and practices through the prism of the concerns posed by a social justice worldview. In this sense, the essays that comprise sj Miller and David Kirkland's collection issue an important call to action for those engaged in social justice work in education.

The Think Tank Review Project provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think-tank publications. Reviewers for the Think Tank Review Project apply academic peer review standards to reports from think tanks and write brief reviews for the project web site. They are asked to examine the reports for the validity of assumptions, methodology, results, and strength of links between results and policy recommendations. The reviews, written in non-academic language, are intended to help policy makers, reporters, and others assess the merits of the reviewed reports.

"School closings, the threat of which hang over Chicago public schools, and which have been a central feature of Bloomberg educational policies in New York, are perhaps the most controversial features of the Obama administration's "Race to the Top" initiative. The idea of closing low-performing schools, designated as such entirely on the basis of student test scores, removing half of their teaching staff and all of their administrators, and replacing them with a new (typically charter) school in the same building, is one which has tremendous appeal among business leaders and almost none among educators. Advocates see this policy as a way of removing ineffective teachers, adding competition to what had been a stagnant sphere of public service, and putting pressure on teachers in high-poverty areas to demand and get high performance from their students, once again based on performance on standardized tests. For a "data driven" initiative, school closings have produced surprisingly little data to support their implementation."

"Yesterday, Matt Di Carlo over at Shankerblog put out his April fools post. The genius of the post is in its subtlety.  Matt put together a few graphs of longitudinal NAEP data showing that Maryland had made greater than average national gains on NAEP and then asserted that these gains must therefore be a function of some policy conditions that exist in Maryland. In the Post-RTTT era, Maryland has been the scorn of "reformers" because it just won't get on board with large scale vouchers and charter expansion and has resisted follow through on test-score based teacher evaluation. Taking a poke a reformy logic, Matt asserted that perhaps the low charter share and lack of emphasis on test score based teacher evaluation… along with a dose of decent funding might be the cause of Maryland's miracle! Of course, these assertions are no more a stretch than commonly touted miracles in Texas in the 1990s, Florida or Washington DC, most of which are derived from making loose connections between NAEP trend data and selective discussion of preferred policies that may have concurrently existed.  The difference is that Matt was poking fun at the idea of making bold, decisive, causal inferences from such data. Such data raise interesting questions. What I found so fun and at the same time deeply disturbing about Matt's post is that the assertions he made in satire… were nowhere near as absurd as many of the assertions made in studies/reports, etc. I discussed here on my blog over the years. Here are but a few examples of "stuff" presented as serious/legit policy evidence, that make Matt's satirical assertions seem completely reasonable."

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

America's leaders have frequently invoked the principle that important policy decisions should be evidence-based. This rhetorical embrace, however, has not always prevailed against the appeal of policy ideas with political resonance or other perceived advantages. The following analysis describes a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon: the approach taken by the U.S. Department of Education in its "Increasing Educational Productivity" project. This example illustrates the harm done when leaders fail to ground policy in high-quality research.