Open up.

The ultimate Obama profile.

First as comedy.

Then as tragedy.

US v UK

Here’s what Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s education guy, says:

ES: Why has England been able to make so much more progress than the U.S. on education reform?

MB: The biggest problem in the U.S. is how you get reform to scale.  The U.S. is full of fabulous boutique projects, but in a sea of underperforming systems.  In England, because we don’t have federal-state separation or the separation of powers between the legislature and the executive, if you’ve got the design right you can have a big impact.  And Labour in 1997 had a big majority, so it demonstrated you could do reform at scale very quickly.

By contrast, I’ve recently been in California, which is almost the same size as England in school population, and was struck by the impossibility of doing anything remotely coherent when you’ve got a state commissioner of education directly elected, a governor directly elected separately, a legislature with a different set of views, and then some powerful mayors. It’s not anyone’s fault—there are some brilliant education reformers around the U.S., including in California—but to do anything coherent in a context like that is so much more difficult.

The other fundamental flaw that I think is absolutely devastating in the U.S. is that because so much of the school system depends on very local taxation, the distribution of funding is inequitable. You can see how it originates in 19^th century American history, but it is a big problem.  Even the best education laws are only leveling up to the same funding per pupil so that high-poverty areas have funding on par with other communities.  Whereas, in any sensible system you’d spend more money per pupil in a high-poverty area than another area. The Conservatives [in Britain] were in power from 1979 to 1997, and they never questioned that. They always thought it was absolutely right to spend more on areas of high poverty than other areas.

Big deal?

Matt Miller in the WSJ on a grand bargain for teachers:

Mr. Obama should therefore go beyond vague talk of modest pay reform and offer a bold new “grand bargain” to reshape the profession. He should make a $30 billion pot of federal money available to states and districts to boost salaries in poor schools, provided the teachers unions make two key concessions. First, they have to scrap their traditional “lockstep” pay scale. In this scheme, a physics grad has to be paid the same as a phys-ed major if both have the same tenure in the classroom, and a teacher whose students make remarkable gains each year gets rewarded no differently than one whose students languish. Second, it has to be easy to fire the awful teachers that are blighting the lives of a million poor children.

The unions will scream. But college students and younger teachers will crave the chance to earn, say, $150,000 if they excel. And smart union leaders know that something like this money-for-reform deal is the only way the public will ever invest to bolster teaching. Mr. Obama mentioned the idea of merit pay once a year ago. But the union blowback was so great that he didn’t broach the subject again until a few days ago in an address to the National Education Association, when (to his credit) he stood his ground and faced some boos from his union audience as a result.

Jonathan Alter in Newsweek with a similar idea:

Obama claims that he’s bold on this topic. But he hasn’t been direct enough about reforming NCLB so that it revolves around clear measurements of classroom-teacher effectiveness. Research shows that this is the only variable (not class size or school size) that can close the achievement gap. Give poor kids from broken homes the best teachers, and most learn. Period.

To get there, Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage “thin contracts” free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.

Elmer, is that you?

Also, at 29 seconds into the video below, did he say “whetoric”? And at 1:16, does anyone else hear “wun amok”?

Maybe I’m just delirious.

In Maryland, the achievement gap narrows. I know, I know, maybe the tests are getting easier. But that should only account for the overall rise in scores, not the narrowing of the gap. Check out that elementary school reading gap!