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The children of the wealthy are pulling away from their lower-class peers -- the same way their parents are pulling away from their peers' parents. When it comes to college completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50% since the 1980s. Upper income families are also spending vastly more on their children compared to the poor than they did 40 years ago, and spending more time as parents cultivating their intellectual development. It may not simply be a matter of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer -- although that certainly is a part of it. The growing differences in student achievement don't strictly mimic the way income inequality has skyrocketed since the middle of the 20th century. It's actually worse than that. Today, there's a much stronger connection between income and a child's academic success than in the past. Having money is simply more important than it used to be when it comes to getting a good education.

The similarities between contemporary American educational reform and Soviet educational reform of the 1930s are as striking as they are discomfiting. Of the following three statements, which refer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which refer to America today? 1.  "Teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs….The stakes are huge-and the time to cling to the status quo has passed."   2.  "We had to have a campaign for 100 percent successful teaching…all students must learn." 3.  "Poor work by the school and poor achievement by the entire class and by individual pupils are the direct result of poor work by the teacher."   Although all three of the above sentiments could be attributable to current officeholders in Washington, D.C., only the first is American-from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Duncan 2010, January). The second and third are policy statements which emanated from old Soviet policy papers on educational reform (Ewing, 2001, p. 487).

Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

A week ago I posted an interview with Teach For America's head of research, Heather Harding. Ms. Harding answered some tough questions that have been raised in recent months here on this blog. Today, I am sharing some responses to her answers. By way of context, I have come to believe that addressing teacher turnover is one of the linchpins of real reform in our struggling schools. Turnover is a key indicator of unhealthy working conditions for teachers -- and that tells us conditions for learning are poor as well. Programs such as Teach For America allow school districts to ignore these poor conditions, by providing a steady supply of novice teachers. Unfortunately, these novices turn over at a very high rate, and the schools must invest a lot of resources in their training -- which is lost when they leave. There are a number of facts in dispute regarding Teach For America, so we need to look closely at the evidence in order to make sensible conclusions. Here are some of the questions Ms. Harding answered where the facts are in question, followed by responses from myself, and several readers with some expertise in this domain.

Unlike the Texas miracle, the Harvard-Columbia revelations are not based on fraudulent numbers. But what is deeply problematic is the spin that the authors give to their findings. The study examined the incomes of adults who, as children in the 4th through the 8th grades, had teachers of different "Value Added" scores, with Value Added defined as improvement in the scores of students on standardized tests. The study claims that the individuals who had excellent teachers as children have higher incomes as adults; we will examine the validity of this claim below. But first we must ask what these higher incomes mean. When they were children, these individuals were poor. What the H-C authors fail to mention is that even when they had excellent teachers as children and therefore have higher incomes as adults, these individuals, despite their higher incomes, remain poor.

In a recent story, the New York Daily News uses the recently-released teacher data reports (TDRs) to "prove" that the city's charter school teachers are better than their counterparts in regular public schools. The headline announces boldly: New York City charter schools have a higher percentage of better teachers than public schools (it has since been changed to: "Charters outshine public schools"). Taking things even further, within the article itself, the reporters note, "The newly released records indicate charters have higher performing teachers than regular public schools." So, not only are they equating words like "better" with value-added scores, but they're obviously comfortable drawing conclusions about these traits based on the TDR data. The article is a pretty remarkable display of both poor journalism and poor research. The reporters not only attempted to do something they couldn't do, but they did it badly to boot. It's unfortunate to have to waste one's time addressing this kind of thing, but, no matter your opinion on charter schools, it's a good example of how not to use the data that the Daily News and other newspapers released to the public.

When Michael Bloomberg was elected Mayor of New York City in 2001, the unemployment rate was about 5%. Today it is 9%. That certainly qualifies as poor performance in office. Value decline rather than "value-added." Let's fire him. When Andrew Cuomo was first elected to state wide office as Attorney General in 2006, the unemployment rate was 4.5%. Today it is 8%. That certainly qualifies as poor performance in office. Value decline rather than "value-added." Let's fire him also.

The fractious debate over how much schools can counteract poverty's impact on children is far from settled, but a recently published collection of research strongly suggests that until policymakers and educators confront deepening economic and social disparities, poor children will increasingly miss out on finding a path to upward social mobility. The achievement gap between poor children and rich children has grown significantly over the past three decades and is now nearly twice as large as the black-white gap, according to Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. He examined data on family income and student scores on standardized tests in reading and math spanning 1960 to 2007.

"Poverty continues to be the No. 1 impediment to educational success, as children of poor families are more likely to drop out than wealthy children, and the report suggests that solutions have yet to be found for high-poverty school districts: School budgets are tied to property taxes. This is why schools in poor neighborhoods get about half as much money per student than schools in affluent neighborhoods. To make generational progress for students from low-income families and prepare them to be successful in secondary and post-secondary education, many say change must be student-centered. But nationally, education standards are intimately tied to income."

With the release of the NAEP TUDA stats, there's been a lot of conversation swirling around achievement gaps and the efficacy of neo-liberal education reforms in urban districts. In particular, there's been some talk about how to judge Michelle Rhee's legacy, especially in light of the fact that that DC has the largest achievement gap between black and white students and one of the highest between poor and non-poor of all the cities featured in the report. Education journalists such as Alexander Russo weighed in here and Dana Goldstein offered some mostly solid analysis here.

I always cringe when I hear so-called reformers say poverty is "no excuse" for lack of student achievement. It is not because I don't subscribe to that belief, but because I know politicians will use that message as an excuse for not "leveling the playing field" for poor children. To believe that you can treat and fund all schools in the same way meets what many call the definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. From collective bargaining contracts to federal law, poverty has to be a factor in every decision that affects the education of poor children and those who educate them.

In today's Washington Post and then on Fordham's site here, Fordham's Mike Petrilli and AEI's Rick Hess write that we are "defining excellence down" by not sufficiently challenging high-achievers. They are concerned that the nation's focus-federal education efforts in particular-will "compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students." Petrilli and Hess seem to think the federal government is wrong to force schools to have equitable numbers of poor kids in advanced classes because, let's be realistic, the "unseemly reality" that poor kids are way behind and can't hang in tough classes is just a fact. Putting them in tough classes isn't fair to anyone (including our kids who could really reach the moon if these other kids weren't dragging them down).

I would also ask you to please stop promoting the myth that unions are abusive and make it impossible to fire bad teachers. Unions only ensure that all teachers have due process to protect them from abusive admin. (And no, I am not saying that admin. is abusive, but just as there are poor teachers out there… there are poor administrators.) It is not the unions job to evaluate teacher performance. But it is the unions job to be be sure that disciplinary action is justified by requiring proper steps to be taken.

In future generations, historians are likely to tell the following story. Some time during the early 21St Century, a cross section of the top leadership of American society began to panic. They looked at the growing chasm between the rich and poor, the huge size of the nation's prison population, the growing gulf in educational achievement between blacks and whites and poor and middle class children and decided something dramatic had to be done to remedy these problems. But instead of critically examining how these trends reflected twenty years of regressive taxation, a futile "war on drugs," the deregulation of the financial industry, the breaking of unions and the movement of American companies abroad, America's leaders decided the primary source of economic inequality could be found in failing schools, bad teachers, and powerful teachers unions.

What I'm not for… and I'm not yet sure what's going on here… is pretending that we can simply shut down schools in high poverty neighborhoods, blaming teachers and principals for their failure, and then either a) replacing the school management and staff with individuals likely to be even less qualified and less well equipped to handle the circumstances,  or b) initiating an inevitably continuous pattern of displacement from school to school to school for children already disadvantaged.

The city is threatening to shut down six poor-performing charter schools, officials said Wednesday.

We're never going to significantly narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor unless we narrow the "good parenting gap" between rich and poor families, too.

Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education's leveling effects.

The problem with education in Connecticut is income inequality, not teacher quality. Unfortunately, the plans Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has outlined for education reform - for the most part - take us in entirely the wrong direction. Education in Connecticut is a paradox. Though the National Assessment of Educational Progress consistently ranks the state among the highest scoring for student achievement, we also suffer from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gaps in the country.