Obama’s Education Agenda Getting Good Reviews

So it seems as if President Obama’s education agenda is sparking a buzz across the nation. In fact a large segment of Americans are giving President Barack Obama’s education agenda a thumbs-up, showing broad support for merit pay for teachers, expanding charter schools, developing common assessments, and more, according to a poll released last week. The survey, conducted by Phi Delta Kappa International and the Gallup Organization, reports that 45 percent of respondents gave the president an A or B when grading his efforts on education during his first six months in office. Mr. Obama received a C from 26 percent of respondents, a D from 11 percent, and a failing grade from 10 percent of respondents. Eight percent said they didn’t know how to grade the president’s performance.

Not surprisingly, the president’s scores were higher among Democrats than Republicans, with just 17 percent of Republicans surveyed giving him an A or B, compared with 70 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of independents. That’s similar to the 46 percent who last year said they viewed Mr. Obama as the presidential choice more likely to strengthen public education. ("Survey Gives Obama Edge on Education," Aug. 27, 2008). The public, however, lacks the same confidence in the nation’s schools as a whole, the poll found, with just 19 percent giving American schools top grades. But respondents favor their own local schools, with 74 percent giving an A or B to the school their child attends.

The poll, released annually by PDK, a professional society based in Bloomington, Ind., and the Princeton, N.J.-based Gallup, was conducted from June 2-24, using a national sample of 1,003 adults aged 18 and older. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Support for charter schools has been on an upward trend, with 64 percent of respondents now saying they favor charter schools, up 13 percentage points from last year, and an increase of 15 percent over the past five years.

Mr. Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have made increasing the number of charter schools a significant part of their agenda, making the flexibility of states’ charter school laws a criterion for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competitive grants from the economic-stimulus law. “We are not surprised there is an increase in support, because the more people understand what a charter school is, the more likely they are to support it, because it is a very simple, commonsensical idea based on performance and accountability,” said Jeanne Allen, the president of the Washington-based Center for Education Reform, whose organization is a major charter booster.

Yet confusion remains over the nature of charter schools. When asked for their opinions based on what they had heard, a majority of respondents thought charter schools charge tuition, are free to teach religion, select students on the basis of ability, and are not public schools. The percentage of people who believe most of the mischaracterizations has declined over the past three years in most cases, but Ms. Allen said the confusion is the result of campaigning against reforms by the “education establishment” and misleading poll questions. “We have long seen that America needs an education on charter schools,” Ms. Allen said. “Despite how much they have grown over the years, and despite how much support there is among our nation's leaders on all levels, charters are still relatively unknown unless they are explained in the context of someone’s own community.”

Still this year’s poll included questions about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus legislation passed earlier this year by Congress, and its impact on education. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they knew a fair amount or more about the legislation, which William Bushaw, executive director of PDK International and the poll’s co-director, said seemed high. Even so, those respondents had a clear preference that the money be used to save teachers’ jobs. Forty-six percent of respondents said avoiding those layoffs was a priority, with 36 percent saying support for low-performing schools should be top priority. Despite record amounts of federal money flowing to America’s schools, the recession has heightened concern about school funding. Lack of money for schools was listed as the biggest problem affecting public schools, with a record 32 percent of poll respondents giving it top priority.

Even though interest in teacher quality and effectiveness is running high among policymakers—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, is set to spend $500 million in an attempt to improve teacher effectiveness—Americans don’t seem quite as concerned. Just 3 percent of poll respondents said a lack of good teachers is the biggest problem for schools in their communities. Meanwhile, 72 percent of respondents say they favor merit pay in general for teachers, with advanced degrees, student test scores, and administrator evaluations ranking as the top measures for assigning raises.

In spite of high support for the annual testing requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the nation’s main federal K-12 education law, just 24 percent of respondents said they believed the law was having a positive impact on their communities. “I believe that Americans have strong support for the overall purpose of the legislation,” Mr. Bushaw said. “I think their push back has to do more with the punitive components of the legislation.” Despite the public frustration with NCLB, the poll also shows broad support from Democrats and Republicans for states using a single national test. Mr. Duncan has set aside $350 million from the Race to the Top fund for common assessments to be developed from an effort to create common academic standards for the nation’s schools. The vast majority of states have signed on to the effort.

So as the U.S. Department of Education prepares to throw $3 billion in one-time money on the table to improve perennially foundering schools, a gulf is emerging between what federal officials would like to see done with the funds and what many districts say is their capacity—and inclination—to deliver. While some districts say the federal largesse and direction will help advance improvement strategies already under way, others warn that the department’s vision, as outlined in regulations proposed last month, leaves little room for local prerogative. And some district officials—particularly in small, rural areas—worry that the regulations now being finalized may be tough to implement given the dearth of organizations and individuals with expertise in turning around low-performing schools nationwide.

Therefore local capacity and the proper balance of federal oversight will be crucial tests for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s pledge to turn around what he has termed the nation’s 5,000 “chronically underperforming” schools. ("Obama Team's Advocacy Boosts Charter Momentum," June 17, 2009.) His vehicle is the existing Title I School Improvement fund, which is receiving $3 billion for fiscal 2010 in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus program, on top of $546 million the program already is getting this fiscal year. The cash represents the heftiest infusion ever to finance interventions at schools that have continually failed to meet the achievement targets of the No Child Left Behind Act.

“The increased federal direction is necessary because few districts have made significant headway in improving their lowest-performing schools,” said William H. Guenther, the president and founder of Mass Insight Education & Research Institute, a research organization in Boston. The regulations are “a terrific step forward,” said Mr. Guenther because states and districts will need cover from the federal government to take “politically difficult” steps necessary to transform low-performing schools. “We know that sending in school improvement teams by themselves is not a turnaround strategy,” he said.

Still, Steve Barr, the founder of the Los Angeles-based Green Dot Public Schools, which was singled out by the department as a success story in overhauling low-performing schools, said there aren’t enough groups and individuals with the necessary expertise. “I don’t see a huge surge in turnaround people yet,” Mr. Barr said. Right now, there is “a small, hearty group of turnaround specialists. … It’s got to be a lot bigger.” Then a chronic issue is the Title I School Improvement fund was first authorized with passage of the NCLB law in 2001, but it didn’t receive any funding until fiscal 2007, when it got just $125 million. In addition to the stimulus aid, the Obama administration would like to shift $1 billion into the program from Title 1 grants to districts in fiscal 2010, although lawmakers appear unlikely to go along.

In proposed regulations that would govern the use of stimulus and increase budget funds to accelerate turnaround efforts, the department is outlining four options for school districts. ("Tight Leash Likely On Turnaround Aid," Sept. 2, 2009.) One would require that chronically underperforming schools be closed and reopened as charters, or turned over to a charter operator or outside educational management organization. A second would call for the school to be closed and for students to be sent to higher-performing ones elsewhere in the district. Another possibility—the so-called “turnaround” model—would call for schools to replace the principal and half the staff, as well as implement a new governance structure and a new or revised curriculum. And the final option, the “transformational model,” would require schools to use student-progress data to determine when to reward and dismiss teachers, extend learning and planning time, revamp curriculum and instruction, and implement other changes.

“Those choices don’t leave school leaders much room to scale up programs that seem to be working at the local level,” said Carlos Garcia, the superintendent of the 55,270-student San Francisco district. “There can’t be a cookie-cutter approach to this,” Mr. Garcia said, particularly since any interventions will need buy-in from school staff members, parents, and the community to be successful and sustainable. “Do they think we’re incapable of creating models for transformation?” San Francisco has had success in offering principals and teachers in low-performing schools intensive professional development, he noted. He would like to be able to consider continuing that practice with the new resources.

The Education Department, Mr. Garcia said, should allow districts to try out “models that aren’t perfectly preproscribed.” Otherwise, “we’re killing off the concept of innovation.” Mr. Garcia is also wary of the focus on charter schools, since, in his view, the research on their effectiveness is “rather mixed.” And he’s worried about provisions that would require the removal of teachers and instructional leaders at the lowest-performing schools. “What incentive would there be for anyone to teach at these schools?” he asked.

“Another challenge of finding personnel to replace those who have been removed is particularly steep for rural schools,” said Gail Taylor, the director of standards and assessments for the Vermont education department. The state has roughly 92,000 public school students. “For instance, a couple years ago, a remote district in the Green Mountain State launched a nationwide search for a school improvement specialist,” Ms. Taylor said. “It wasn’t like we had a lot of people jumping to come to the northeast corner of Vermont,” she said. Ms. Taylor said that if districts must remove school principals—as they would in nearly all cases under the proposed options—there may not be anyone qualified to take their place. “It’s going to be a challenge to find someone with a better set of skills,” Ms. Taylor said. “We need to grow these people on our own” by providing more intensive support to existing leaders, she said.

To that end, the state education agency would like the option of targeting resources to help bolster professional development for superintendents and principals across the state. But other local officials feel that the regulations are a good fit. Laura Weeldreyer, the deputy chief of staff for the Baltimore schools, said the more-than 82,200-student district has already begun to move in the direction the federal Education Department has suggested. For instance, Superintendent Andres Alonso last school year closed six low-performing schools. And the district has been welcoming to charter schools, she said. “I feel this helps us to be poised to take all that work to the next level and, hopefully, help a lot more kids,” Ms. Weeldreyer said

Money in the stimulus law meant to stabilize state budgets—about $39.5 billion nationally—simply helped Baltimore fill holes, she said. But the school improvement dollars will give the urban district a chance to make new investments in efforts already under way, in her view. The options presented by the federal government may represent substantial change for many schools, Ms. Weeldreyer said, but other strategies don’t seem to produce significant results. “Has anybody seen radical improvement [from an intervention] that doesn’t fall to one of these categories?” she asked. “If they have, I’d love to know what they were doing.”

Edmond T. Heatley, the superintendent of the 50,000-student Clayton County school district, outside Atlanta, also thinks there is enough flexibility in the four options offered under the proposed regulations. In 2008, Clayton County, under a previous superintendent became the first district in almost 40 years to lose its accreditation because of governance issues involving the school board. ("Loss of Accreditation Rocks Georgia District," Sept. 3, 2008.) Mr. Heatley said his district is more likely to pursue the turnaround and transformational models. “Those options allow the district to try out innovations—such as refocusing schools around specific themes—without giving up managerial control or losing community support,” Mr. Heatley said.

At least one school improvement expert said those two models aren’t as likely to result in lasting change. “You could call something ‘turnaround’ and swap out 50 percent of the staff, but that doesn’t mean there’s going to be a massive sea change in the culture there,” said Andy Smarick, a distinguished visiting fellow with the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Mr. Smarick, who worked in the Education Department during President George W. Bush’s administration, has higher hopes for starting new schools from scratch. He said that gives the new schools’ leaders a chance to set high expectations from the beginning. But Mr. Heatley does not think the community would embrace closing schools and sending students elsewhere. And while he supports charters, he doesn’t like the message that closing a school and turning it over to a charter operator model would send about the district’s view of its own management.

Even though the money for school improvement in the Recovery Act represents an unprecedented windfall for school improvement, some superintendents are nervously eyeing the so-called “funding cliff” in the stimulus law. The ARRA covers just fiscal 2009 and 2010. Although the federal funding for school improvement can be spent out over three years, it’s not clear that appropriations will remain as high in the future after the one-time recovery act money is gone. “That puts constraints on districts’ planning,” Mr. Heatley said. He is hoping the federal government will continue financing the school improvement program at a boosted level, so that the Clayton County district can build on the investments it makes with the stimulus funding. If the resources are only available for a limited time, “it will be like putting a Band-Aid on an open-heart wound,” he said. Funding is also likely to be an issue in San Francisco, where the state has cut education significantly to close a daunting budget deficit. “If this money had been available a couple of years ago,” we could have done quite a bit with it,” San Francisco Superintendent Garcia said. “But right now, we’re in survivor mode.”

Thus, Obama’s education agenda overall seems to be getting a good review although there are still some who question certain parts of it but this is the most money the Department of Education has received in a long time. Plus the broad range of ideas for change in order to improve educational standards across the board seems to be one of the things that many educators and American citizens seem to enjoy the most about Obama’s approach to education along with the fact that he is backing it up financially. That is positively major because it makes everyone at least more willing to try Obama’s new ideas for radical reform in education.