‘Carrots, Sticks and the Bully Pulpit’ at AEI

Last week, Early Ed Watch attended an event at the American Enterprise Institute on the federal role in public education. Five panels – discussing 11 papers – explored the last 50 years of federal education policy. The point was to ask whether federal incentives, penalties and role-modeling – the “carrots, sticks and bully pulpit” of the event’s title – are doing any good in improving American education.

In this post, we’ll highlight a few of our takeaways.

On the Federal Government’s Role in Promoting Research:

“There is a pendulum that swings between rigor and relevance,” said Mark Schneider, vice president for New Education Initiatives at the American Institutes for Research. “We argue that while there may be a sweet spot somewhere, where there is perfect alignment between rigor and relevance, we don’t know where that is and it probably doesn’t exist in the real world.”

According to the Schneider, the Institute for Educational Sciences (the federal agency for educational research) has focused on making research rigorous and is now shifting toward more of a focus on relevance, specifically on making rigorous research such as randomized experiments more applicable and usable. Schneider pointed out some of the issues with focusing only on rigor:

• There is great variance across classrooms, schools and districts and no guarantee that the lessons learned in one place will be transferrable to another.
• It’s difficult to identify the specific part of an intervention that works. There have been a number of randomized-control trials done with charter schools, for example, but because there are lots of different variables (like length of day, school culture, teachers) in any one school at any given time, it is no easy task to isolate the degree to which each of makes a difference.
• It is costly and time-consuming to do large-scale studies.

     Schneider also spoke about challenges related to relevance:

• Personnel move around, and this turnover in state and district offices often results negated agreements to conduct research and obtain student data.
• Officials are impatient to see signs that interventions work within short time frames, particularly in turn-around schools where much of the research takes place.
• Practitioners become too involved in the research, which can taint results.

On Phasing Out Programs:

The federal government rarely asks questions like “should we do this anymore?” According to Checker Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, programs and ideas that are identified for abolishment typically find their way back onto the Department of Education’s plate—usually as a result of politics not because the programs showing good results. During the panel discussion, Finn identified several “dud” programs that have stuck around as well as a list of “gamechangers,” among them are the Brown decision on segregation in the schools, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the National Assessment of Educational Progress and most recently Race to the Top.

On Supporting New Players:

Jal Mehta from the Harvard School of Education spoke about the emergence of “jurisdictional challengers,” and about how the federal government could support these new education players. (A jurisdictional challenger is essentially someone who is attempting to replace the people who are presently responsible for doing certain work at a given time, said Mehta during his presentation.) The current challengers are organizations such as Teach for America, KIPP charter schools (run by the Knowledge is Power Program), and New Leaders for New Schools (an organization that designates and trains good principals through a selective application process).  These organizations are competing with the traditional educational players like education schools and traditional public schools. Mehta defined four ways the federal government can stimulate the new actors and provided examples of how the Obama Administration is supporting the challengers:

• Rhetoric- the Obama Administration has said that we can no longer support the status quo or defend the dropout factories
• Regulations- programs like Race to the Top and i3 and encouraging state to change charter laws for example
• Subsidies- providing funds to state-level reforms that are making changes and providing money directly to the challengers
• Incorporation- Placing challengers in influential government roles

Mehta also made the point that the federal and state governments don’t have to pick a side. By supporting the new actors, he said, the government is “betting on the actors rather than specific programs.” State governments, for example, can change laws to support alternative certification while also improving standards for traditional certification models. It does not have to be an either or.

The event was K-12 focused, but ensuring that all children get the right start came up more than once. This is true. But we’d like to start hearing some meat behind words like, “If we don’t get kids on grade level early enough, they will never catch up.” We think the federal government can play a huge role in spurring states to improve early education systems birth through third grade and the quality of early education programs. We hope to see some meaningful efforts in state’s applications for the Race to the Top- Early Learning Challenge.

You can find the 11 draft papers and a webcast of the event on AEI’s website. (Quick plug: One of the papers, “Jurisdictional Politics: The Emergence of a New Federal Role in Education,” was co-written by former New America Foundation fellow Steven M. Teles, who is an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.)