THE EDUCATION FRONT

The Dallas Morning News' Diane Rado produced an insightful story Sunday about Dallas' problem with 10 of its high schools being on the lowest rung of the No Child Left Behind ranking system. I won't re-report her details. You can read them here. But I would like to offer some ideas that readers can consider as they think about chronically failing schools, especially if they're trying to figure out how serious a district is in saving kids in those schools.

Admittedly, turning around failing schools is difficult, but there are ways to see if a district is getting after this. Here are a few thoughts:

First, what is a district doing to bring in operators of successful charter schools, like KIPP, to give the students in failing schools an alternative? I don't mean having a nice one-time talk with operators of proven charters, but a serious wooing of them to help.

Second, what are districts doing to help schools who may have a problem with a small group of students but not necessarily the entire school? What are they doing to get them over the hump? For example, what sort of reading intervention strategies are they using? Or who are they following or talking to get the best math expertise? The National Math and Science Initiative is trying to ramp up schools' ability to teach math. Are districts talking to groups like that?

Third, what kind of leader is a superintendent bringing in to fix a problem school? Hopefully, they are moving strong principals into these schools. But they don't always do that.

Now, I admit superintendents are kind of like major league baseball managers. They don't always have the best talent surrounding them. If that's the case, and they don't have enough good principals, who is the superintendent consulting for help? What educational leaders is he or she talking to for counsel?

Fourth, what kind of pressure is a district putting on its middle schools? If it is truly intervening with them so their students are increasingly likely to reach high school ready for those demanding years, maybe that district deserves a little slack in its attempt to turnaround failing high schools. But if the district is only giving lip service to middle school reform, they deserve no slack.

Fifth, where is a district recruiting its teachers? What educational schools does it seek out? Which one of the emerging teacher prep programs, such as The New Teacher Project or Teach for America, is it getting on the phone? Again, I don't mean a call here or there, but a big effort to draw in teachers who've gone through rigorous leadership training.

There is no magic way to turn around schools. But there are ways to determine how serious a district is in pursuing that goal.

You could see this move coming a long time ago.

A few years back, as states started getting nervous about No Child Left Behind holding them responsible for their students meeting the educational standards of their own states, their officials started fiddling with their collars and asking for more breathing room, even weakening their standards. Now comes the Obama administration, and its education secretary Arne Duncan is floating the idea of giving up on No Child's goal of seeing how many students in each school are making significant progress each year. He's also suggesting Congress give up on the goal of children being proficient in their subjects by 2014, calling that part of No Child "utopian."

If the administration has its way with these two changes, let's just be honest: We as a nation will be giving up on kids, especially the many poor and minority children who are stuck in failing schools. We as a nation will be saying, we don't think you can learn at grade level. And we don't think we should ask you to achieve at an academic rate that will prepare you for a complicated world. That's the hard, cold reality, so if we decide to go down that road, let's just be realistic about what we are doing.

Now, with that said, there are certainly ways and places to improve upon No Child Left Behind, which was passed nine years ago with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both houses. No law is sacred, and there are ways to improve upon this bill.

Here are a few:

1. Allow states to show progress with their students, even if not all are proficient. In short, let them distinguish between the improving ones and the terrible ones.

That's called "differentiated consequences," and it's a concept that Bush Education Secretary Margaret Spellings used to let states show they are making some progress, just not enough progress. The idea allows schools to keep working with struggling students without being put on a black list.

2. Make sure the standards of each state prepare kids to graduate from high school with the skills for either a good trade job or college. Duncan talks about college/career readiness being a new goal, so pursue it, much like Texas did in adopting a new school accountability system in 2009.

But let's be specific about what these terms mean and what we expect kids to do to earn that recognition. Fuzziness will not help them compete in a world where others are rushing to become the next global economic powers.

3. Give states more money to improve low-performing campuses. This is a no-brainer, as long as the concept is more money-and-strong standards. If it is more money and less accountability, then this reform will make no sense at all.

4. Extend the date that states must have their students learning at grade level. I liked the 2014 goal because that let states take their entering kindergarteners in 2002, when the law kicked in, and get them at grade level by the time they walked across the stage and collected their high school diploma in 2014.

If Duncan and Congress think that's too hard, kick it back a few years. Just don't give up on it.

Duncan talked about some of these changes in a recent New York Times article. But he really didn't give many details. Evidently, he thinks that's something he and Congress will work on over the next few months.

What we need to hear next are precise details. This isn't about No Child per se, but the concepts in the landmark bill. If there's a way to build upon the idea of measuring students annually and seeing whether they are being left behind, then let's do it. But if that's not what's going on here, let's be honest with the students in Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and everyplace else.

Education Week reports that the Obama administration's Race to the Top program may shape the rewriting of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. If that's the case, we could do much worse.

Race to the Top is based on several important principles: creating high standards, turning around failing schools, rewarding states for providing better teachers, offering students alternatives and using data to inform teachers about how to help students progress. There are other parts to this effort, but these are the big ideas.

I like these principles because they build upon the ones captured in No Child Left Behind. In their own ways, Race to the Top and No Child are about ratcheting up school standards, focusing on student progress and giving students the means to get ahead. They are part of the revolution that began in schools a couple of decades ago, when reformers started putting a new focus on school results. To back away from that revolution would shortchange students, in my estimation.

To be sure, there are differences between Race to the Top and No Child. For example, the Obama administration wants to create national standards for schools, while the Bush administration left it up to states to create their standards. While that's a substantial point of divergence, both efforts are still on the same side of the fence when it comes to embracing demanding standards. And that separates them from those in both parties who complain about too much emphasis on meeting benchmarks.

The rewriting of the ESEA will be a big education issue this year, if Congress gets going. I hope the Obama administration pushes for these goals to shape the act. There are plenty of folks on Capitol Hill and in the education world who would like to go in a different direction, so the White House is going to have to stand its ground.

Gov. Rick Perry still wants no part of a move to establish national standards for English and math instruction in public schools. Texas education officials - with Perry's backing - told the U.S. Department of Education in June that Texas would not participate with most other states in developing the standards, spelling out what students at all grade levels should be taught in those subjects.

Even though it is now apparent that Texas has severely hurt its chances of getting a piece of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top federal grant program for schools, Perry said in a letter to state Education Commissioner Robert Scott Tuesday that he remains opposed to inclusion of Texas in the national standards. "The citizens of Texas, not the federal government, know what is best for our children," said Perry, who has hammered away at various federal stimulus programs as he runs for re-election next year.

Although Scott insists that Texas still has a chance of being awarded the estimated $350 to $700 million that it's eligible for under Race to the Top, the decision to forgo national standards deprives the state of at least 40 of the 500 possible points that will be used in the application process. It also doesn't help that Texas officials have been at odds with the U.S. Department of Education over differing interpretations of what determines whether a teacher is "highly qualified" - a requirement of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The department is pushing for more stringent standards.

The fact that the U.S. Department of Education has informed the Texas Education Agency that first-year elementary school teachers must pass a broad exam to be considered "highly qualified" will not go down easily with some teachers. But this is a good move by Washington, if you think kids, especially in poor inner city schools, deserve decent teachers.

The DMN's Terry Stutz reported this story last week. The TEA said then, and recounted to me yesterday, that the agency was surprised by the ruling. Evidently, the feds had never seen a problem with Texas' teaching corps in the past.

But the No Child Left Behind Law requires teachers to be certified as highly qualified. And hallelujah for that. Improving the teacher corps is one way to make sure that every child can learn at grade level. Meeting that goal will never be easy, but we can be assured of this: Students will not get there without good teachers.

To his credit, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been making a huge deal out of improving the quality of teachers. He talked about this once again in a speech last week at Columbia University, where he challenged schools of education to turn out better teachers. That takes guts given the power of teacher unions in some parts of the country. But he and President Obama show no signs of backing down.

As far as the Texas situation goes, TEA spokesperson Debbie Ratcliffe told me yesterday that the agency is drafting a response. It has about 30 days to get one in, and the agency is considering asking for a compromise: Let first year teachers off the hook this year for passing the "generalist" exam that would show whether they are qualified to teach in more than one subject. In return, the agency will require all first year teachers in the 2010-2011 school year to pass the exam.

That sounds reasonable. The state's not off the hook, but it wouldn't have to administer the test at least one-third of the way through the school year. We're now in late October, it will take the TEA some time to file its response and then for the feds to consider it. We could be talking mid-December. And, Ratcliffe says, districts will start canceling contracts for low-performing teachers in March. The bottom line is there may not be much utility in administering the test this school year.

(As far as Dallas goes, DISD spokesman Jon Dahlander told me late yesterday that the district has about 75 teachers who would be eligible for this test. DISD's preparing to offer them training for the test and the exam itself, if they must this school year.)

I hope Washington accepts the TEA's compromise. But I also hope the feds keep the pressure on.

Teachers and administrators may hate having to deal with this certification exam, but they aren't the ones who should be our first concern. Students sitting in classrooms where teachers aren't qualified enough to teach deserve first ranking.

Editor's Note: After Ted Kennedy's death, The Education Front asked former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to share her recollections about working with the late senator on No Child Left Behind and other issues. Below is her response:

When I moved to Washington D.C. in late 2000 to become President Bush's Chief Domestic Policy Advisor, my first assignment was to work with Congress to enact the No Child Left Behind Act that the President had championed on the campaign trail. This law was unique in that it represented an approach far different from most Republicans in Washington who had called repeatedly for the abolition of the US Department of Education. Bush had worked with tenacity on education in Texas and focused especially on the needs of poor and minority students.

In that work he and Ted Kennedy found common cause. They both believed passionately in the opportunity that education can and must provide to all our children and they worked together to finally fulfill that promise through the accountability approach embodied in No Child Left Behind.

During the development of this law I had the wonderful opportunity to work with and get to know Senator Ted Kennedy. I arrived in Washington with all sorts of ideas about what Ted Kennedy must be like, but what I found was just the opposite. As has been said by so many, Kennedy was kind, smart, knowledgeable, and respectful. He was a master teacher to all those lucky enough to work around him.