Education

School Reform Engine May Be Losing Momentum

By: David Harrison - November 24, 2010 12:00 am

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — This has been a busy year for education reformers. Primed by billions in stimulus funding, states spent much of 2010 scrambling to complete ambitious school improvement plans outlined in detail in hundreds of pages of applications for federal ” Race to the Top ” funding. Many have adopted policies that are central to the Obama administration’s education agenda, such as changing the ways teachers are evaluated, giving more latitude to charter schools, revising student tracking systems and putting an emphasis on turning around low-performing schools. As part of a separate but related effort, 41 states have adopted a standard math and English curriculum endorsed by federal officials.

But now, as the year ends, the reform enthusiasm seems to have cooled. Out of 46 applications received, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to only 11 states and the District of Columbia. The looming end of stimulus money and other federal aid has state education officials anticipating cuts in state funding. And a new corps of lawmakers and governors swept into office Nov. 2 on a promise to limit federal involvement in state policy, a potential setback to the reform efforts. Last week, for instance, Alabama’s Governor-elect Robert Bentley objected to the state school board’s vote to adopt the common core curriculum. Bentley said he wanted the decision postponed until he had a chance to review the new standards.

THE GATES RECIPE

Computer entrepreneur Bill Gates has been devoting much of his time and considerable amounts of money to school reform efforts. Stateline staff writer David Harrison interviewed Gates Nov. 19 in Louisville. Here are edited excerpts from that interview.

Stateline: We’ve been talking about education reform in this country for a long time. We’ve had a lot of school experiments over the years and there hasn’t been a whole lot of improvement. Do you worry sometimes that we might reach reform fatigue?

Bill Gates: What we consider the most important thing of all, which is measuring and rewarding and transferring teacher effectiveness, really hasn’t been tried. There was a little bit in Tennessee in the early 80’s and there are reasons why that worked a bit for a time and then it didn’t work. We now have some technology enablement in terms of surveying students, doing teacher videos, having some data systems that track progress and we have a little bit more willingness to make change, because as people look at the test scores both in the absolute and relative to other countries, it’s a more dire situation now than in the past.

Stateline: Imagine it’s, say, 2020. What would a well-functioning American high school look like?

Gates : Well, fundamentally the teachers in that system would be getting lots of feedback about what they’re doing well and not so well. They’d be looking at each others’ videotapes and they’d be thinking about who’s the very best at dealing with disruption. Who’s the best at teaching various mathematical concepts? There would be some use of technology that would allow the school day to have been extended without it being an impossibility relative to the budget. Probably no textbooks, some type of digital device and lots of online videos.

Stateline: How can states get entrenched constituencies to change the status quo?

Gates: You need to get the teachers to buy in. Teachers do like to work with other good teachers and they do want their students to achieve. Now when you put that in the face of a new personnel system they’re going to be leery of the change and you do have some who may never embrace change. If you’re a teacher, 20 years in, investing in your pension, you’re getting your seniority pay, you’re getting your masters pay, it’s really against your interest to have a system that goes back and at least puts some of the money to effectiveness. And so where you have to grandfather some people in, that’s a political calculus that will have to be done. You won’t get everyone, but there’s every reason to think that teachers–once they see a personnel system that isn’t capricious and isn’t high-overhead–they will become the greatest advocates for the thing.

Stateline: A number of the things you’ve pushed for through the foundation have been reflected in Race to the Top and in other aspects of the Obama administration’s education policy. Your foundation has given a number of grants to these efforts. How do you respond to critics who say that you’re using your considerable grant dollars to drive American education policy?

Gates: We’re absolutely not. There are huge differences between the awardees of our money and federal money. We’re for student achievement and we’re for anything that gets student achievement up and so is the Department of Education, so are a lot of actors in this thing. We don’t come at it thinking we know the magic solution. In fact we’ve been evolving as we’ve seen different results. But 90 percent of what we do is to help back innovators who are out there trying different things. I would say if you took all the different ideas about reform you wouldn’t find any particular commonality between what we’re doing and what the Department of Education is doing.

Photo courtesy of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Given the funding issues, state school officials across the country now are bracing for a pushback against some of the reforms even as they work to implement them. “If we look at what has happened in recent elections, if we look at the tone of the conversation, it will surprise me if there’s not an increased response by some people who think this is a misplaced effort,” says Utah state superintendent Larry Shumway. “There’s a lot of hard work to be done and most of us are very under-resourced. That may play into the bounceback we’re going to get.”

Implementing the common curriculum, for example, will be expensive. State tests and textbooks will have to be replaced, and teachers will have to be trained on new materials. It remains to be seen whether states will be willing to spend large sums of money on these changes unless their fiscal situation improves. “It’s one thing to write an application for federal funding,” says Russ Whitehurst, an education specialist at the Brookings Institution, “and quite another thing to implement those reforms. Even without the election results of Nov. 2 most observers thought there was going to be a lot of slippage between the promises that were made and the reforms that were implemented.”

Already, Ohio’s incoming Republican governor, John Kasich, wants to undo an education funding law put in place by current Democratic Governor Ted Strickland, a move that Strickland says could jeopardize the state’s $400 million Race to the Top grant. In Rhode Island, another Race to the Top winner, Governor-elect Lincoln Chafee has questioned doubling the number of charter schools in the state, an expansion that was part of Rhode Island’s application.

In other states, including Arizona and New Hampshire, school officials have vowed to push for the reforms laid out in their Race to the Top applications even though they did not win any funding in the competition. But they could find themselves under pressure from the new political environment and tighter budgets. “We need to have a communal language,” says Virginia Barry, education commissioner in New Hampshire, where Republicans gained control of both legislative chambers. “We need to listen to each other.”

Despite tight budgets and political differences, there could be common ground over some parts of the Obama administration’s education reform agenda. Michigan lawmakers, for instance, will consider a bill introduced by a Republican state senator and a Democratic representative to reform teacher tenure and tie it more closely to student test scores. And new governors in Wisconsin and Florida have talked about tying teacher pay to the performance of their students, a central tenet of Race to the Top, over the objections of teachers’ unions.

Efforts to reform teacher compensation have found a champion in Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a program to study ways to measure teacher effectiveness in nine school districts and one charter school group. In a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers here last week, Gates urged state education officials to pursue reform of school personnel systems despite the bad economy. Instead of rewarding seniority, he said, schools should reward good teaching.

“When you design a [personnel] system that is not rewarding performance,” he said, “every element of it becomes ineffective.”

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