The Senate’s ESEA Reauthorization bills (the old Harkin bill and the newer Harkin-Enzi version) elicited a familiar reaction from interest groups representing teachers, principals, and school administrators and from conservative eduwonks following the legislation: federal overreach.
You have Rick Hess: “I’m not worried about going ‘back’ to 1994… partly because some of the ‘retreats’ are actually sensible steps informed by a better sense of what the feds can and can’t do well.” Clearly, he’s sharing notes with Mike Petrilli: “Targeting ‘dropout factories’ might sound like a good idea until you consider the Department of Education’s capacity (or lack thereof) for tackling something so complicated and complex.” And further along in the post, Petrilli argues that some of the bill’s provisions around comparability and teacher quality and equity may be “worth pursuing – but at the state and local levels, not from Washington.”
Not from Washington. So based on these criticisms, the policies in the original Harkin bill – particularly the requirements for teacher and principal evaluations, equitable distribution of highly-rated teachers, and turning around low-achieving schools – weren’t necessarily bad ones. The problem was where the policies were coming from: from Washington, not state capitals. In Hess’s words, the “feds can make states and districts do things, but it can’t make them do them well” – the Department of Education is good at two things: “prohibiting things or writing checks.”
Now, I agree somewhat with Hess and Petrilli on their point around school turnarounds. In ‘dropout factories’ and persistently low-achieving schools, the majority of school improvement efforts – whether they originate from federal, state, or local efforts – have failed. We haven’t figured out an exact formula for school improvement yet. And it’s apparent in the Harkin-Enzi legislation. States would choose from an array of options – some familiar from SIG, others modified or added to the mix. States could apply to the Department to waive certain requirements of the Transformation, Strategic Staffing, and Turnaround models. And states have complete discretion to design their own “new and innovative” turnaround strategies. So basically, this falls into the “writing checks” category. Yes, the federal government is requiring states to intervene in some struggling schools, but it’s basically footing the bill for whichever models the states choose or design.
On the teacher provisions, I completely disagree. This is an area where we need federal intervention –the kind of intervention proposed in the original Harkin bill. First, the legislation gave states leeway in the right place: designing their new teacher evaluation systems. Student achievement and classroom observations would have been included, but the weight of each component was up to states. As was the decision over whether to use value-added data or other determinations of student achievement. States would have also been able to include other measures as they saw fit, as long as the systems included at least 4 distinct levels of quality.
Further, the original Harkin legislation was restrictive where it needed to be: ensuring that students in high-poverty and high-minority schools were not disproportionately taught by ineffective teachers. Petrilli called this a “Fairyland provision.” But aren’t the feds good at “prohibiting things” too? Like prohibiting states and districts from shortchanging poor and minority kids? This is an equity issue at its heart – familiar turf for the federal government. In 1965, the first ESEA was essentially a companion bill to the Civil Rights Act and played a key role in desegregating schools and equalizing school funding. When it comes to teacher equity, do states and districts have the political will to move forward on their own? If history is any indicator, the answer is no.
The teacher evaluation provisions Harkin supported were ambitious changes, but they aren’t a fantasy. In Harkin’s original bill, once the disparities in teacher quality between schools and districts were made transparent by the new evaluation systems, states and districts would have to address the equity issue. The teachers unions allege that these provisions would make districts forcibly transfer effective teachers to high-poverty and high-minority schools (even thought this is prohibited by the contracts they help write). However, there are multiple ways to get at the teacher equity issue, including improving our existing teaching force through professional development and coaching. Sure, incentives could be put in place to encourage the best teachers to relocate. And maybe the most ineffective teachers could be ushered out of the profession. But that’s not going to be enough.
It’s not going to be easy to improve the distribution of effective teachers, and I don’t think 5 or 8 years of effort under a new ESEA is going to solve the teacher equity problem. However, it will be downright impossible if states and districts aren’t even required to collect and report the information in the first place.