Gambling With Education

A treasure trove of implications for school children can be mined from the election returns on Tuesday--not just as a result of the big race but also from a number of key ballot measures I discussed last week.

But before getting to the initiatives, a quick dissection of what President-Elect Obama may mean for children in the early months of his administration. There are two quick and easy wins that look to be likely bets on any 100 days type calendar: expanding funding for children's health insurance --a measure vetoed by President Bush--via SCHIP and passing a new college tuition tax credit to benefit at-need college students in exchange for community service.

The tougher question is what President Obama will do about reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (AKA NCLB). It's unlikely that he will tackle NCLB in the early part of his legislative calendar simply because: 1.) It will cost a lot of political capital to do so, and 2.) that capital, in the eyes of most Americans, is more urgently needed on economic action, energy policy, troop numbers in the Middle East, and even health care. So the best answer to the question, what will President Obama do on K-12 education in the very early going? He'll punt... at least until middle-late 2009.

To the ballot measures: Missouri, Colorado, Maryland, and Arkansas each had ballot proposals to increase access citizen access to gambling with a back-end result of increasing (or substituting) public education funding. All four initiatives passed. Just goes to show what happens when you bundle up a bunch of core American values--freedom, education, risk-taking, greed--in one neat package and place it on a ballot: people will vote for it.

Nebraska and Colorado each had initiatives to ban affirmative action, part of California millionaire Ward Connerly's steady march to rid states of the policy one by one (affirmative action bans have been passed in Connerly's home state of California, Washington, and Michigan in previous elections). The ban passed easily in Nebraska, but was just declared defeated in Colorado, by the narrowest of margins.

Colorado wasn't done with controversial measures affecting education, though. A trio of anti-union measures, Amendments 47, 49, and 54 were up for decision as well, and the first two were defeated easily, largely through the campaign organizing of the Colorado Education Association. 47 & 49 would have made it illegal for school districts to force teachers to pay their union dues by witholding pay from their paychecks, a fairly common practice in schools across the nation--but Union control lives on. Amendment 54, however, passed narrowly--a measure designed to limit the lobbying influence of organizations who receive no-bid / non-competitive contracts from the government. The measure was supported as a pro-democracy plan to limit lobbyist and special interest influence; teachers unions are likely to file suit over the initiative on first amendment grounds.

Lastly, the initiatives I was personally most curious about: Oregon measures 58 and 60...

Both failed by wide margins--58 proposed to restrict non-English instruction in schools and 60 attempted to change Oregon's system for teacher pay from a seniority-based system to a merit-based system. No question that 58 runs counter to progressive notions of equity along racial and ethnic lines by essentially rendering Spanish and other second language classes not just inferior, but illegal in certain school settings.

But measure 60 is a bit tricker. It is the kind of measure that was no doubt destined to fail, but which just may prove prescient; the kind of idea that is rightfully placed directly before voters because entrenched political interests are unlikely to support it. The idea is this: if we, as a people, believe that data systems are appropriate and in place such that educators can be measured, rewarded, or recognized as in-need of improvement based on how much they are helping their students learn, then shouldn't that be a system of paying teachers that deserves consideration instead of paying our oldest teachers most (which may be, at best, only loosely tied to student learning)? In other words, it's totally appropriate to pay an experienced teacher "A" the most money out of an entire staff if teacher "A" is in fact helping their students advance the most in math, reading skills, science, etc. And if that's the case, can anyone make an argument for why we would pay teacher "B", whose students, year-in and year-out, show absolutely no improvement in reading or math skills more than teacher "A"? No way right?

Now what if I told you that teacher "A" has been a teacher for 6 years and teacher "B" for 30 years. Would you suddenly want to pay teacher "B" more (in some districts, as much as 100% more) just because he is older? I can't think of a single reason why we'd do that. At its heart, that is what measure 60 was about, though. Of course, there are lots of nuances about the data and why any merit system has to be cautious so as to avoid over-drawn conclusions, but Oregon Measure 60 is not some political hack job idea--it's a serious issue.

Finally, in perhaps the most important decision still to be made, word on the street is that there is a leading contender in the race to be the First Dog promised to Sasha and Malia Obama:

GOLDENDOODLE!!!!

Aaron Tang is the co-director of Our Education, a non-profit organization working to build a national youth movement for quality education. He also teaches 8th grade history in Saint Louis, MO.