Education on the Agenda

Check out the new Strong American Schools website. This group is pushing for a substantive education debate in the '08 presidential race as opposed to the usual vague generalities. Amen to that! An unusual idea, it's like a presidential campaign, but the candidate is education. And with the help of Roy Romer's prestige and big money from places like Broad and Gates, it looks like it's going to make some waves in '08.

On the subject of support among teachers...

This news from MoJo should be a wake up call to those who think NCLB will implement itself. NCLB will do little to improve education if teachers don't believe in or support it.

The Little Credential That Couldn't

Though I focused on class-size, there was another great story of waste in the new Clotfelter, Ladd & Vigdor study: Master's degrees don't matter. Kevin Carey over at the Quick and the Ed writes this one up well and draws the fire he was looking for from teacher's union defenders of MA differentials. Check it out.

New York Squanders Opportunity to Innovate

After the blogathon that was my second post, I was a bit tuckered out, but this piece of news out of New York was just too much to bear.

The theme of the article is the state budget overall and it talks mostly about who is getting how much. The good news is that Spitzer has successfully pushed New York in the direction of Fair Student Funding (FSF). But buried within that big budget is the following gem:

The Bloomberg administration also praised the lifting of the state’s limit on charter schools [to 200], but there were compromises on that front, too, including a provision that automatically unionizes [emphasis mine] the employees of any charter school serving more than 250 students in its first two years.

Without wading too far into a discussion of Charter schools generally, it is fair to say that the whole idea of charter schools is based on allowing some schools to run themselves differently in order to innovate new ways to help kids. Some ideas will succeed and some will fail, but the point is trying something new to SEE if it will work. Because they are not unionized or governed by typical regulations, charter schools can experiment with policies like longer school days and school years, merit pay, or differential pay for teachers in shortage areas like math and science (or for that matter higher pay for teachers combined with larger class-sizes).

And anyone who has heard of the amazing success of some charter schools like KIPP knows that some of those ideas (particularly more time in school) have worked really, really well. Friends and enemies of charters alike recognize that one of the biggest differences between charter schools and district schools is the lack of unionization in charter schools. And one does not have to be an opponent of unions to admit that the collective bargaining process slows down and restrains the ability of a principal to try radical, new approaches. With automatic unionization, charters end up being not much more able to innovate than normal district schools.

It is another debate entirely to discuss whether the benefits of experimentation are worth the costs. But to allow experimentation only under the conditions that a school not actually be allowed to experiment is equivalent to banning the practice in the first place.

To say "You can have more charter schools, as long as you run them like district schools" is essentially to say "There will be no such thing as charter schools in New York."

P.S. On another fun note, the budget deal also requires New York to cut class-sizes. While I'll stay out of this fight for the moment, on account of New York really pushing the limits of potential non-linearity on class-size (frequent 35-40 person classes or so I hear), I doubt rather severely that the reductions will be targeted to those classes only.