NPE: National Public Ed Report Card

Every reformy group in the country regularly issues "report cards" about how well states are pursuing one reformster policy or another. We have been long overdue for a report card for how well states are defending and supporting the public education system that is one of the pillars of democracy. Now that wait is over.

The Network for Public Education today releases its 50 State Report Card, providing a quick, clear, simple look at how the various states are doing when it comes to supporting public education.

NPE has developed the grade based on six criteria; the actual research and point breakdown were done with the assistance of Francesca Lopez, Ph. D. and a research team at the University of Arizona. And yes, NPE is aware of the irony of using letter grades, a rather odious tool of reformsters.

As a matter of principle, NPE does not believe in assigning a single letter grade for evaluation purposes. We are opposed to such simplistic methods when used, for example, to evaluate schools. In this case, our letter grades carry no stakes. No states will be rewarded or punished as a result of our judgment about their support or lack of support for public education.

States ended up with a GPA based on the six factors. The top state score was a 2.5 (Iowa, Nebraska, and Vermont) and the lowest was Mississippi with a 0.50. Let's look at the best and the dimmest in each category.

No High Stakes Testing

NPE looked for states that rejected the use of the Big Standardized Test for a graduation exam, a requirement for student promotion and a factor in teacher evaluation.

Grade A: Alabama, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Vermont

Flunkeroonies: Mississippi

Professionalization of Teaching

Here NPE looked at nine factors, including experienced teacher pool, average early and mid-career salaries, rejection of merit pay, teacher attrition and retention rates, tenured teachers, high requirements for certification, and proportion of teachers prepared in university programs. In other words, is teaching actually treated like a life-long profession for trained professionals, or a quick pass-through temp job for anybody off the street?

Grade A: Well, that's depressing. Nobody. Iowa and New York scored B's.

Bottom of the Barrel: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Texas. No surprises here, particularly with North Carolina and Florida, which have gone way out of their way to trash teaching.

Resistance to Privatization

Of course, dismantling public education and selling off the parts to profiteers has been a signature feature of reformster policies. So NPE looked at resistance to choice in all its various porcine lipstickery formats, resistance to using public tax dollars to pay for private schools, controls on charter growth, and rejection of the parent trigger laws.

Grade A: Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia

The Pits: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. Ka-ching.

School Finance 

Equitable and adequate funding is the great white whale of education. Even when states put better funding formulas in place or are forced and fine by the courts to get their act together (looking at you, Washington), there's a whole lot of fail out there. NPE looked at per-pupil expenditures adjusted for poverty and district size, school funding as a part of state gross product, and how well the state addresses the need for extra resources for high-poverty areas.

Grade A: New Jersey. That's it.

Stingy McUnderfunding: Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota

Spending Taxpayer Resources Wisely 

This is where NPE sets its spending priorities (contrary to some critical opinion, pubic ed supporters do not simply believe that public ed should have All The Money). The priorities that NPE focused on were lower class size, less variation in class size by school type, more pre-K and full day K, and few students in cyber schools.

Grade A: Well, nobody. Montana gets a B.

Centers of Foolishness: Idaho, Nevada, and Washington

Chance for Success

This category looks at societal factors that can have an impact on student success. NPE researchers focused on proportion of students not living in low-income households, proportion of students living in households with full-time employment that lands above the poverty line, and how extensively schools are integrated by race and ethnicity.

Grade A: None. But ten B's, so there's some hope here.

Failureville: Alabama, California, Georgia, Mississippi, Montana, and Texas


The report comes with an appendix that gets into more detail as far as specific methodologies. In fact, one of the general strengths of the report is that it's very easy to take in the results at either a quick and simple level, or to drill down for more detail. In fact, the NPE website has a handy interactive map that lets you take a quick look at each state's grade breakdown. 

The report is handy for comparison, and for a depressingly clear picture of which states are beating up public education badly. It is transparent enough that you can discuss and debate some of the factors included in the findings. I can certainly see it as a tool for young teachers looking for a place to land.

Take some time to look through the report. It's not a pretty picture, but understanding where we are will help us develop more ideas about how to get where we need to be.

Yong Zhao at NPE: Must See Video

If you are going to view or pass along just one hour's worth of viewing to explain why the reformster testing mania is unsupportable, the panic over failing schools is manufactured, and the entire justification for stripping schools (particularly those with poor, non-white students) is bogus, this is the video for you.

We all have some Kardasshian. Out-of-basement readiness. Why Zhao didn't buy shampoo. Why America is still here. Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer. And why we need to stop trying to imitate China.

I especially recommend this to show your friends who are not fully immersed in the ongoing debate about US public schools. Highly accessible, very funny, clear and still full of facts-- this is well worth the 55 minutes you will need to watch it.


Yong Zhao (final) from Schoolhouse Live on Vimeo.

(Note: Updated to include the final cut of the speech, complete with slides)

Randi, LIly, and Diane at NPE

It was the marquee event of the NPE convention. Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten sitting down with Diane Ravitch in front of a stuffed-full ballroom. I did not take notes, and the video is not up to rewatch yet, but I want to put my impressions down before they fade too much.

An organizer made one more fruitless attempt to get a room filled with teachers to behave, because when it comes to behaving like good students, teachers are the worst. But as he did so, he informed us that 1,000 people were already online to watch-- so we had to start on time.

Xian Barrett did the introductions, which had to be just a bit nervewracking, but he set a nice tone-- not too formal, but still respecting the weight of the occasion. Nicely done.

My expectations were not high. Both Garcia and Weingarten have carefully staked out and fully fleshed out positions, and while they are the faces of their unions, they are also tied to a big bundle of leadership teams and union bureaucracy. I did not imagine for a minute that either was suddenly going to throw up her hands and say, "Yeah, you know what? I've been wrong about that. I'm going to go ahead and reverse my union's position on the spot."

But it was my first time to see either in person, and I was interested to see how that played out.

Both came in full professional labor leader snappy dress and were whisked to one side moments before the start to don official NPE t-shirts. Garcia by far beats all comes in a hair contest-- it is just a magnificent mane, as iconic as an Elvis DA flip.

The discussion got off to a somewhat plastic start-- Ravitch asked a question and each leader in her turn launched into full-on campaign mode, which led to Ravitch's imposition of a three minute time limit on answers. Ravitch was herself as moderator-- one minute she's a scrappy political veteran and the next she's your grandmother learning how to use a smartphone app.

My not-high expectations were met. Garcia displayed a great grasp of how privatization, crushing unions, dismantling democracy, and test-and-punish all fit together into a larger picture that is bad for teachers, students, and public education. But she either can't or won't see how Common Core is part and parcel of that same drive to break up public education, and her enthusiasm for the Core (there's a great app for the Core! whee!) is both disappointing and intellectually puzzling. Hating testing and loving the Core is like going to the pound and saying, "I want to take home a puppy, but only the end that smiles and licks you on the face. I don't want to take home the end that poops."

Both were support-ish of the opt out movement (Parents should be able to do it; teachers should be able to talk about it). But neither was very strong in denouncing the enshrinement of testing in the ESEA rewrites. You can read a full version of what were essentially Garcia's remarks which boil down to "Less testing, less punishment for test results, and no using tests for purposes for which they weren't created." She is not so much envisioning a world without the Big Standardized Test as a world where the Big Assessment is so swell that everyone welcomes it cheerfully (in part because her imaginary assessment will cover what she considers the good parts of Common Core). She might as well envision a future in which students will ride to school on the backs of brightly colored dinosaurs. The assessment she imagines cannot and will not exist on a national scale.

I did hear Weingarten say one interesting thing (well, two, if you count the part where she said that she had no particular desire to marry her partner). What I believe I heard her say was that testing "has killed" or "has destroyed" the promise of Common Core. I'll be checking the tape-- if I'm correct, then Weingarten just declared Common Core dead, which is not as good as repudiation, but I'll still take it. Her hardest question actually came afterwards, when Mercedes Schneider asked her about that damn robocall to help Cuomo (let's not pretend it wasn't that).

The big moment came with the agreement by both that their unions would no longer take money from Gates. I don't imagine for a moment that they did so on the spot (or that they have the authority, really, to make that decision), but it was still a nice moment.

It was interesting to see their personal styles on display. I have to love Garcia for being quick-witted and snarky; plus, she speaks in a manner that seems completely authentic, like a regular human being. Weingarten is more of an old-school labor leader who suddenly erupts into a hollering bluster that I expect is a measure technique for whipping a crow up into a frenzy, but on Sunday seemed a bit affected and at times over-the-top. But I was born in New England, so maybe that's me.

I know lots of folks who watched from home and in the ballroom were disappointed. I wasn't, but as I said, I wasn't expecting much. Large national unions cannot turn on a dime, and labor leaders live with political realities (we may not like it, but I have heard multiple times from multiple directions that mandatory testing is untouchable in ESEA in part because advocates for civil rights and students with disabilities support testing fervently).

Their support of Common Core is misguided and wrong. Their opposition to test-driven reform-- but not the actual tests-- is befuddling. They have some great things to say about building and defending union power-- but having the power would mean a great deal more if they'd use it for something useful. I haven't liked their position on Common Core and testing

But here's the thing to like about Sunday at NPE.

They were there.

The two leaders of the largest teacher unions in the country agreed to come explain themselves and answer questions in front of a houseful of people who were vocal advocates for public education. Think back less than two years to Dennis Van Roekel dismissing NEA member opposition to Common Core with a flip, "Well, what do you propose to do instead?" That's not where NEA is now.

Even if you're just paying lip service-- you can't do it if you don't know what the answer is supposed to be. Two years ago our union leaders didn't even know that. Before giving her answer about testing, Weingarten acknowledged that some people were going to boo (they didn't, and there wasn't much booing, but there was plenty of hissing at some of the worst)-- she knows that her positions are not popular with advocates for public education.

Two years ago the Network for Public Education barely existed, and the support for public education that it represents was fragmented and invisible to the folks doing political calculus. Not that long ago national union leaders could have easily dismissed NPE and the viewpoint it represents. Today, they cannot.

On so many fronts, the folks who stand up for public education are becoming harder to ignore (looking at you, NY opt outs). Reformsters are spending money to try to rebut and respond to public education advocates. In fact, Peter Cunningham of Education Post, the heavily financed pro-reformster rapid-response PR organization was also at the convention this weekend.

You know the drill. First they ignore you. But eventually, they can't. The movement to defend and support public education has become strong enough that the union presidents came to us to talk about it. Yes, they brought much of their same old baggage. But they came.

As several speakers noted this weekend, this is a long haul. We are not going to turn any of the large organizations involved quickly or abruptly. But we can help them evolve. And the best place to start is with our natural allies, and THAT can't start until they show up to talk to us. Who knows-- maybe next time they'll come to listen to us, too. Baby steps.

The Not So Friendly Skies

Blogging will be sporadic this weekend, as I'm coming to you from the Drake Hotel in Chicago, quite possibly the fanciest hotel I have ever stayed in in my life, but still in an earlier century when it comes to wi-fi (everyone remembers the steam powered wi-fi of the 1890s). Also, I'll be composing on my surface, so be prepared for even worse typos than usual.

The plane was delayed in Cleveland last night, and as we finally taxied down the runway, there was some soft of rhythmic thudding as if a large moose were caught in the wheels, or possibly a Studebaker. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on how calming it is to know that as we defy the laws of gravity and fling our frail little bodies through miles of sky, we are in a fragile tin can designed, built, maintained and piloted by people who are actual trained professionals, not amateur dabblers.

If you are going to fly me somewhere, I need more than your good intentions or really cool ideas that came to you in the shower. It will not comfort me to know that you were really successful at playing shuffleboard or running a widget factory or just moving money around into it swelled into a giant pile.

Nor do I need you to stand next to me at the airport and berate me for not having enough grit to propel myself through the air. Nor is it useful to tell me that I have no business using gravity as an excuse and don't I believe that people can fling themselves from Cleveland to Chicago.

The "friendly skies" motto is powerful precisely because we know the sky is not friendly-- particularly when there are tens of thousands of feet of it between us and the hard, hard ground. Toni Morrison wrote in Song of Solomon that if you surrender to the air, you can ride it, but I like that more as a metaphor than as practical advice. If I'm going to surrender to the air, it will be in the company of trained professionals using tools created by trained professionals. The very least we can do for our children when we try to connect them with an education is to promise them the same.

NPE: My Session

For those of you who are going to Chicago (cause your baby can take you), we'll have two opportunities to meet. One will be at the luncheon, where I have been promised a Watch What Happens style grilling by Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire.

On Sunday, in the last choose-your-own-session spot (known to seasoned conference attenders as the Skip It While You Finish Packing To Leave session) I'll be doing a presentation loosely entitled "Teach Writing Like a Writer and Not Like a Test Prep Content Delivery Specialist." I'll share just a bit of what we've learned about how to test prep for writing at my school, to set up what I've learned about teaching writing from a perspective of real actual writing and not just filling in the paper for a school assignment writing.

If people attend, I'm hoping we can do a little discussing and sharing, and in that spirit you're invited to send me questions of issues that are concerns of yours. I don't know All The Answers, but I know several of the questions. I'll talk both about some technical, mechanical tricks I know as well as some of the bigger thinky issues involved in making some brain adjustments in how students approach writing. The idea is not to turn every student into a professional paid author, but to get them to approach writing like an important part of human expression, and not a painful torture used only in a classroom. I am sure I don't know great secrets that nobody else knows, but my dream is that a bunch of us who are excited about writing can share and support and confirm each other.

I'm both excited and terrified about going to Chicago-- I feel like I'm taking my ukelele to go hang out with rock stars, but I'm on the other hand, I'll get to actually see some faces and hear some voices and meet the rock stars. If you're going, I'll warn you right up front that I am absolutely terrible with names and probably not as clever or snappy as I appear to be on the screen. But I am really looking forward to connecting with everyone from all over (and some of my oldest friends in the world live in Chicago, too). I will be the one with the slightly dazed expression right next to the woman who's way too good for him. If you are also dazed and feel out of your depth, find me and we'll start our own table in a corner.

(And if you're still thinking about going, here's some info...)

ESEA: Time To Speak Out (Again)

Word on the street is that as soon as this coming Friday (February 27), the House of Representatives could be voting on H.R. 5- The Student Success Act. That means it's time for defenders of US public education to speak up. In a few paragraphs, I am going to tell you just how easy it is to speak up this time, but first let me make my case for why you need to do it.

H.R. 5 is the House GOP proposal for rewriting ESEA, and while the Legislation Currently Known As NCLB desperately needs to be rewritten, this is the not the rewrite we've been looking for.

The proposal is almost 600 pages long; even so, many smart people have read through that monster (Mercedes Schneider got through 52 of the more important pages and you should look at what she found). But the four big fire engine red flags are:

1) A requirement for Big Standardized Testing in every year from grade 3 through grade 8, plus once in high school. This gives the BS Testing the force of law, enshrining what we know to be unproven, unnecessary, and unhelpful.

2) Title I funding would be portable, which is a less-alarming way to say that Title I would become a student voucher, inevitably making poor schools even poorer.

3) Cuts way back on Title II funding for class size reduction. Because if we're going to support BS Testing, for which there's no proof of benefits, why not even things out by unsupporting smaller classes, for which there is proof of benefits.

4) Expands support for charter schools and charter school companies. Because politicians hate throwing money at public schools, but throwing money at charters is awesome.

So. It's time, again, to write your Representative. I know you're a teacher and it's not really your thing to be politically active. I know you have a lot of other things to take care of. But you know who doesn't have anything else to worry about except politics and legislation? Lobbyists.

This is part of why we struggle uphill on this reformster stuff. We've got classes to teach and papers to grade and lessons to plan and lunch money to collect and school plays to direct and paying attention to politics, following politics, speaking out to our politicians-- those are all things we have to squeeze in around the edges. But meanwhile, there are people out there who literally have absolutely nothing to do all day except agitate for their causes.

If we are going to counterbalance an army of corporate shills and well-paid lobbyists who spend every single day explaining to legislators why America really needs to support test corporations and charter companies and everyone else trying to divert public education tax dollars into private corporate pockets-- if we're going to be a counterforce to those people, we have to speak. And speak. And speak.

Because, I have to tell you, this is not the last time we'll be called on to speak up. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and the reauthorization of ESEA is going to spawn a long windy parade of bad ideas auditioning for the role of Actual Law, and we're going to have to speak up every single time one rolls its parade float past our door. And we have to be tough and relentless because there will always be those paid lobbyists for the corporations getting up every morning with nothing to do except try to move legislation to their employers' benefit.

We can't count on someone else to do it. It wish we could count on our national teachers' unions, but they keep getting confused about what they support.

Fortunately, this time there's an easy approach.

The Network for Public Education, a group of public education supporters to which I proudly belong, has set up a quick an easy way to make your voice heard. Follow this link. Don't know for sure who your rep is? You'll type in your zip code and automatically get a form addressed to your representative's email. Not sure what to say or how to say it? The letter is already written; send it as is, edit it to suit, or erase it and write your own. And while you're at it, you can join NPE if you haven't already. Which you should.

Heaven only knows how long it will take to get an ESEA rewrite through both houses, or how long it will be before the next rewrite. But whatever comes out of this round will be the law we live with for years. It will be hard to get Congress to listen to us, and we may not succeed in all the ways we want to. But nobody is going to hear us if we don't speak. Raise your voice now.

Network for Public Education Makes History Saturday

This coming Saturday, the Network for Public Education will present an event this coming Saturday that represents a new sort of end run around money, power and media. PUBLIC Education Nation (October 11), is an answer to events such as NBC's Education Nation, the biggest, slickest, most nausea-inducing infomercial for reformsters one could ever hope to see.

It's one of the great challenges we face. How do people who don't have the ear of the media, who don't have twelve million dollars to set up an agitprop website, who make their living doing something other than pushing a political agenda-- how do those people get their message heard?

The answer is-- on the internet.

On Saturday, starting at noon, there will be a live event in the auditorium of the Brooklyn New School, featuring four panels:

Testing and the Common Core: New York Principal of the Year Carol Burris will lead a discussion  with educators Takeima Bunche-Smith, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen and Alan Aja.

Support Our Schools, Don’t Close Them: Chicago teacher Xian Barrett will moderate a panel featuring education professor Yohuru Williams, Hiram Rivera of the Philadelphia Student Union, and a representative of the Newark Student Union.

Charter Schools: North Carolina writer and activist Jeff Bryant will host a discussion that will include New Orleans parent activist Karran Harper Royal, New York teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein, and Connecticut writer and activist Wendy Lecker.

Authentic Reform Success Stories: The fourth panel will be led by Network for Public Education executive director Robin Hiller and will include New York teacher and activist Brian Jones, and author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, Greg Anrig.

Diane Ravitch and Jitu Brown, In Conversation: The event will finish off with a conversation between leading community activist Jitu Brown and Diane Ravitch, who will talk about where we are in building a movement for real improvement in our schools.

There are some great names here, and subjects well worth discussing. There is clearly an agenda for solutions, not just complaining about reformster baloney.

Anybody connected to the internet can watch a live stream of the event. And if you would like to help with the costs, you can follow this link to the NPE website and contribute by way of paypal. So make your contribution, mark your calendar, check your internet hookup, and plan to be part of a historic and informative event. It is possible to be heard, to connect, and to get the word out, even if NBC isn't interested in doing it.

The Antidote to Money

Money has poisoned many of the conversations in this country, shaping the debates about everything from wars in foreign lands to the future of American public education. Money has an unprecedented power to control the public discussion simply by taking control of the major media (which are, after all, contained within just six corporations).

Ironically, today there is also unprecedented power for ordinary citizens to circumvent the major media. And if you're reading me, you've seen it in action.

I produce this blog with a budget of $0.00, and yet every day, there are several thousand reads on these pages. And I'm not one of the big dogs in the education conversations. Diane Ravitch, Mercedes Schneider, Anthony Cody, Jose Luis Vilson, and I would go on and on but there are so many names I would break my blog-- so many people who have energized and informed the discussion of public education on a budget somewhere between slim and none.

Meanwhile, the Big Guns of Reformsterdom can whip up $12 million to start yet another in a long line of astro-turf faux activist reform-shilling websites in Education Post, claiming that they just want to renew the conversation. In just a few years, Common Core and its attendant circus of reform clown cars has gone from a sure thing and done deal to a subject so contentious and toxic that politicians who want a national profile can't back away from it fast enough (sorry, ex-next-President Jeb Bush). And the amazing part of that shift is that it represents a battle between heavily financed forces and a bunch of citizens with computers.

That's the one cool thing about this debate-- we don't have to raise money; we just have to raise awareness.

There are challenges. The folks standing up for public education represent a broad, broad, broad group, and it's no small challenge to represent every viewpoint within that wide band. While that can be a point of contention, it also, to me, represents the strength of pluralism which stands in contrast to the sometimes-BORGlike appearance of the reformsters. Add in the people who stand against the reform movement, but not necessarily in favor of public education, and you're talking about a large and varied group of viewpoints.


But the beauty and terror of the internet is that all these voices cannot be silenced. Not even as, time and time again, the major media fail to give them a voice.

The Resistance depends on us, all of us, to amplify each others' voices and to spread the word. It also depends on us to keep talking and growing and building toward newer and better understandings, even when we have disagreements, missteps, mistakes, and people in our corner that we wish would go away. It's much harder to do that than to simply pick up and pass along the latest think tank talking point. We have to keep talking, sharing, amplifying, and bringing the conversation back to what matters, even if the Big Bucks Media aren't with us. And with that in mind, here comes something special.

On Saturday, October 11, the Network for Public Education will present a live, on line event, featuring many of the prominent voices in the education debates speaking on many of the toughest issues of the field. See and hear many of the faces and voices that have not been included in education "conversations" in places like NBC's Education Nation.

This is not the change in conversation that many reformsters are asking for (though I believe that many reformster-minded folks will tune in and watch, with interest). But it will further the conversation. And it won't take $12 million dollars to make it happen, and even $120 million dollars couldn't keep it from happening. I encourage you to check out the details, make a contribution if you're so inclined, and plan to keep at least part of October 11 open to click in and watch and listen to people who aren't being paid huge amounts of money to talk about what they believe.