Education Policy in the News

Education Policy in the News is the biweekly e-newsletter of The Forum on the Future of Public Education.  It provides links to recent policy news and reports, notice of upcoming events, and occasional overviews of current policy debates. 

Many education programs get boost in Obama's budget proposal

In the education portion of the State of the Union speech, Obama emphasized incentivizing success and reaffirmed his committment to community colleges.  He also outlined a number of financial aid reforms, including a $10,000 tax credit and limits on the percentage of a worker's income that must go towards repaying students loans.  He set a goal of renewing ESEA, but some experts are skeptical that it can be accomplished this year given the amount of discord NCLB has generated.

While many federal programs face a spending freeze, Obama's budget proposal includes a 6% increase in education spending from FY10.  The National Journal provides an overview of proposed ESEA changes .  All of the new money, and nearly 30% of ESEA dollars overall, will be allocated competitively in an attempt to build on the early success of Race to the Top.  The current AYP system will be dropped and replaced with college-readiness standards based on the uncompleted Common Core.

Other budget proposal highlights include:

• $300 Million for a new math and science program and a total of $500 million for the I3 innovation fund.  The existing Math and Science Partnership program will be folded into the new initiative. 
• $210 million for Promise Neighborhoods, schools with wrap-around support services similar to the Harlem Children's Zone.  
• A $450 million literacy program called the Effective Teaching and Learning Literacy Fund will replace 7 existing programs, including Striving Readers, Even Start, the National Writing Project, Reading Is Fundamental, Ready-to-Learn Television, and Early Reading First.
• An additional $61 million for the Institute of Educational Sciences, bringing their total funding to $261 million.  IES, which just announced new grant competitions, is also continuing its evaluation of how schools are spending stimulus funds.
• The maximum Pell grant would increase about $400, but many higher education leaders are worried about cutting the LEAP matching funding program and the availability of funds for other programs. The administration expects that savings from passing the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsiblity Act will pay for Pell grant increases, the $12 billion community college initiative and the $3.5 billion College Access and Completion Fund.  However, passing student aid reform is far from guaranteed.
• Although higher education generally fares well, the proposal cuts the Dept of Labor's Career Pathways Innovation fund, $125 million for community colleges. 

Funds appropriated for new federal educational technology center

After nearly 10 years of starts and stops, Congress has appropriated funds for the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies . Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of both NBC News and PBS and one of the champions of the proposal, said, “It’s time that education had the equivalent of what the National Science Foundation does for science, Darpa does for the national defense and what N.I.H. does for health.”  One of the Center's demonstration projects, a video game about the immune system, is available online .   The Department of Education is also developing a new National Educational Technology Plan to "provide a vision for how information and communication technologies can help transform American education."  The public comment period closed in December, and responses are available here. 

A number of reports on students' use of technology have been released recently:

•  A new report from Kaiser finds that 8-18 year-olds devote over 7.5 hours a day, on average, to using entertainment media.  Much of that time is spent multitasking, leading to nearly 11 hours of total media time per day. 
•  Kids think they are great at effectively multitasking, but in reality, they're lousy at it.   From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people." Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. 
• A survey from Sloan reveals that fall 2008 online enrollments were up 17 percent from a year before. Over a quarter of higher ed students take some portion of their coursework online.
• Recent research indicates that kids are not nearly as adept at internet searching as many expect, and boys tend to give up searching sooner than girls. 
• OMG texting helps students become gr8 spellers.  A study from England suggests that texting may be good for literacy skills because "text language uses word play and requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English."

A Deeper Look at... Innovation in Education

In the "Deeper Look" section, we identify an ongoing debate in policy circles and provide an overview of the arguments on both sides.

The Role of Innovation in Education
The need for greater innovation in many sectors has been very prevalent in the Obama administration's rhetoric and policy. An article in the American Prospect takes a critical look at the role of innovation in social policy:
"The Obama administration has been promoting 'innovation' to anyone who will listen. The stimulus package includes more than $100 billion for innovation efforts across fields as diverse as school reform, energy research, health care, and poverty alleviation…. It's difficult to argue with the Obama administration's decision to provide $400 million for a new energy-research agency called ARPA-E, which will look for technological solutions to global warming. Or the administration's proposed $19 billion investment in electronic health records.... Social policy is where the innovation agenda gets tricky. The incentives are less clear, the outcomes are more difficult to measure, and the entire endeavor is more open to ideological debate."
 

What does innovation mean in education and how much emphasis should it receive in state and federal policy?
At the National Journal, a number of educational leaders, many from charter school organizations, have participated in a discussion on innovation led by Jim Shelton and John Easton from the Department of Education. A few examples of the arguments presented:

Nelson Smith, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: "If a teacher is hungry to learn a new skill, what autonomous funding can she invest in the training, and how many permissions does she need? If a principal spots a new platform for self-paced instruction, how long will it take to persuade the district to adopt it, factoring in lengthy debate by a politically-elected school board? This is where charter schools should have a tremendous advantage, what with their curricular freedom and site-based budgets."

Chad Wick, Knowledge Works: "First, it is simplistic to think of education innovation in the same way we think of marketplace innovation. The education sector is part of a large and complex social system. The real issue about why we don’t seem to sustain education innovation is that as a country we have no shared vision for what we want…no mental model. "

Bruce Hunter, AASA: "The Washington based policy and research community, including the US Department of Education, has two profound problems that cause them to repeatedly stumble when trying to implement innovations. First they persist in one size fits all innovations even though schools vary greatly in nearly every aspect . Second many innovators have a political and ideological agenda, rather than an educational agenda."

Alexander Russo, Journalist: "What about the possibility that innovation is over-rated and that high quality implementation of simple ideas is the real thing we need more of?"

Diane Ravitch, NYU: "It is the responsibility of the federal government to fund and disseminate research. It is not the role of the federal government to dictate "solutions" that are not based on research or court orders. We now seem to be in an era where education decisions are made and imposed by non-educators, who look to the business world for answers. "
 

Commentary from the Forum
In K-12, many reformers look to charter schools to spur innovation. Dr. Chris Lubienski, Forum associate and associate professor in Educational Organization and Leadership, has extensively studied the types of innovation produced through market-oriented reforms.

Chris Lubienski:   "Innovation has indeed been on the minds of policymakers, and not only in American education policy. Leaders in countries around the globe have been considering various strategies to promote innovation in many social and business sectors, and have identified education as a key component in fostering more innovative structures and environments. They believe that schools play an indispensible role in building the human capital and infrastructure to allow their people and their businesses to compete in the global economy. However, the primary concern for policymakers in the US has been finding ways of structuring educational institutions in order to encourage more innovation so that schools can (1) be more effective in raising achievement, and (2) develop new ways of meeting the unique needs of diverse learners. Charter schools in the US are a primary policy mechanism for achieving these goals. Like comparable models in other countries, these autonomous schools have the competitive incentive to find new ways of satisfying consumer demands for education, offering better and more diverse choices for families.

 Interestingly, research on charter schools and similar programs in other countries suggests that simply looking to competition between schools as the driving force to generate innovation may not be promoting the types of innovation policymakers were expecting. For instance, in outlining a framework on innovation strategies, the OECD defines four types of innovation outcomes, including product, process, marketing, and organizational innovations. Yet an OECD report (disclosure: which I authored) on innovations in educational systems finds a weak connection between educational systems relying on competitive incentives and more product and process innovations. Instead, schools often adopt a number of other innovations in marketing and other organizational areas. Such patterns have been evident with charter schools as well, where there is a growing consensus among researchers that charters produce innovation in marketing and management, but not so much in classroom practices, where they were expected to have a greater impact. While surprising to some reformers, these patterns can be understood as resulting from several factors and flaws in the logic of competition as applied to schools. While reformers assumed that greater autonomy and competition would lead to innovation, it is also often true that competition causes managers to use their autonomy in other ways than improving a product or service, such as through marketing or otherwise trying to differentiate their organization from competitors in the minds of consumers. Furthermore, the logic of competition and innovation might not apply to schools in the same way as it does to business firms, since objectives in schools tend to be more vague and diffuse. However, although policymakers are infatuated by the idea of innovation, it could be that many parents prefer that schools focus on effectively providing basic educational goals."


Dr. Lubienski's work on innovation includes papers in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Policy , OECD, and others.