saved by the stimulus, or adventures in accounting

How has the stimulus affected public education?

Teachers appear to have benefited most from the effort to save jobs with the $787 billion recovery package, which sent billions of dollars to states that were on the verge of ordering heavy layoffs in education.

The national data on the impact of President Barack Obama's stimulus plan won't be available until later this month. But based on preliminary information obtained by The Associated Press from a handful of states, the stimulus spared tens of thousands of teachers from losing their jobs.

Not surprising. We saw this very scenario play out here in the Olympia School District earlier this year. A potentially heartbreaking RIF was avoided in large part due to a sudden influx of federal cash, mostly averting--or, perhaps more accurately, delaying--a crisis.

But the article is also a commentary on the government's new attempt to bring transparency to the doling-out process. The brutal honesty quote:

The White House says more than 1 million jobs have been saved or created so far, a figure that is so murky it can never be verified. That's because the White House estimate is based on economic models that try to calculate the effect of tax cuts and the ripple effect of government spending.

And the good news/bad news quote:

Officials have said the unprecedented accounting could become standard for government programs in the future, and this week's data release will offer the first indication of how it's working.

The good news: translucency bordering on transparency. The bad news: somehow this is a new idea.

Obama plans to ruin your summer vacation

Kids who creepily sang Obama's praises the other day: might want to rethink that. Obama wants to amputate your summer break.

"Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

Just give the plan a snappy title--No Child Left Outside?--and watch it sail through Congress.

In all seriousness, reconfiguring the summer break is way, way overdue.

in today's education headlines

1. Kent teachers defy court order; continue strike. (There's no Becca Bill for teachers.)

2. Obama urges all children to assimilate into the Borg.

3. An instrumental version of "Ave Maria" breaches the wall of separation, apparently.

Happy school year, everybody.

(Oh, and one more: Washington's doomsayers predict swine flu for a third of us.)

Obama's speech to schools echoes a previous president

In the Olympia School District, we won't be in school on Tuesday when President Obama delivers a speech to the nation's students. Nevertheless, the controversy over the speech has prompted Superintendent Lahmann to issue a statement:

On Tuesday, September 8, President Obama will do a national address to students about education. The national media has focussed on concerns that have been raised about the address being shown in schools. We have received a few emails and phone calls of both support and opposition about having students watch the broadcast.

Since our students do not start school until Wednesday, September 9, it seems obvious that we will not be broadcasting the President's message to students live. If parents or community members contact you about this issue, please remind them when school starts.

I have attached a copy of a Question & Answer release that the Department of Education sent out related to the President's speech. If staff wants to record the President's speech and use it later as part of a lesson, they may do so just as they would use an other supplemental resource. Given the concerns that have surfaced, please be sensitive to the controversial nature of any use.

The last time a president asked for a bully pulpit at the front of your classroom? Back in 1991, when Bush--George Herbert Walker Bush--asked for support of his educational goals.

Jim Lindgren links to the story, and does a little WestLaw digging to find media reactions.

In October of 1991, I must have been in seventh grade. I don't remember Bush's speech in the slightest.

Barack Obama hearts merit pay

Perhaps as a way to help Americans escape from their economic nightmares, Obama's talking about merit pay. It's working.

In his first major speech on education, Obama said the United States must drastically improve student achievement to regain lost international standing.

"The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens," he said. "We have everything we need to be that nation ... and yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us."

His solutions include teacher pay and charter school proposals that have met resistance among members of teachers unions, which constitute an important segment of the Democratic Party.

I am--gulp--a union member who sees room in educational compensation for merit pay. I know this means coming out of a closet of sorts, but if research connects teacher quality to student achievement, and teacher longevity to competitive compensation, then some reasonable form of merit pay combines the best of both worlds.

What I haven't seen is a merit pay scheme that is truly fair. I can't see any worthwhile use of test scores. For example, as a high school teacher with two vastly different sets of classes--say, two periods Remedial Math and three periods AP Calculus--then roughly 60% of my performance is not directly comparable to the other 40%. Furthermore, I'm standing on the shoulders--or running with the parachutes--of 10 or more elementary and middle school teachers.

Show me a sophisticated metric to fairly compensate performance, Obama team, and I'll be on board.

Until then, I'll remain cautious, optimistic, and--yep--hopeful.

(Charter schools? Evidence of their success is pretty thin. But I'm open to persuasion.)