In Camden, families struggle both with poverty and finding good schools for their children. (Photo by Sarah Garland)

Last week, Michael Petrilli, vice president at the Fordham Institute, usually found staunchly on the side of reformers who support charter schools and more accountability for schools and teachers, seemed to call for a truce. In a panel at the annual Education Writers Association conference at Stanford University (which I moderated), he suggested that No Excuses reformers were softening their schools-only approach.

The research both sides rely on—dating back to James Coleman’s famous federally-commissioned study on educational opportunity in the sixties—suggests that the largest factors affecting how a child performs in school have to do with his or her family circumstances. These out-of-school factors include parent education levels, poverty status, being part of a group that has faced discrimination, and neighborhood conditions, among other important but sociologically complex characteristics.

Schools have a smaller role to play, according to the research. But the current crop of reformers has insisted that with the right tools and strategies, schools might trump the disadvantages of poverty, minority-status, and less-educated parents. This belief in the power of good schools to disrupt the cycle of poverty has partly fueled the recent movement to overhaul the teaching profession so that the quality of teachers—the biggest factor impacting students inside schools—can be improved particularly for disadvantaged students.

Critics of this school-focused approach, including Diane Ravitch, the historian and former assistant U.S. secretary of education, have argued that schools should not be expected to go it alone. Rather, they argue, policymakers should devote more attention and resources to attacking the societal problems that set up children to fall behind their peers in the first place.

Previously, among the reformers, there was a concern that talking too much about the problems of poverty would allow schools to wash their hands of responsibility for their students’ success or failure. Now, Petrilli suggested, people on his side are taking a second look at this assumption.

“We need to stop having these extreme arguments, between ‘No excuses!’ on one side and ‘It’s all about poverty!’ on the other,” he wrote today in a blog post published on Education Week’s website. “Poverty matters immensely. Schools matter immensely. Let’s get on with addressing both.”

Don’t start the chorus of “Kumbaya” yet, however.

In a responding blog post, Diane Ravitch bristled at the suggestion that she did not believe schools matter.

“I do believe that the dramatic income inequality in this country burdens children, nearly a quarter of whom live in poverty. I do think it is a national scandal that our nation has a higher proportion of children in poverty (about 23%) than any other advanced nation,” she wrote. “But I have never said that schools can do nothing to improve the education of poor children until we redistribute income or raise the minimum wage, etc. I have said and written on many occasions that we must improve schools and improve the lives of children at the same time.”

It might seem that both sides are saying the same thing: To make a real difference in the lives of children who struggle to keep up with their more advantaged peers because of both outside circumstances that hold them back and low quality schools that don’t give them an extra hand to catch up, we should address both problems simultaneously.

But there are still many quibbles about both tone and the substance of what exactly should be done to get such a two-pronged strategy off the ground. In heated blog and email exchanges today, Petrilli, Ravitch and others on both sides of the debate argued about whether teaching disadvantaged children more vocabulary and providing a more enriched curriculum would make up for the educational experiences they lack at home, or whether a more sweeping effort to redistribute resources is critical for reducing the achievement gap for poor children.

There have been a few hints of common ground. Reformers like Petrilli and current D.C. schools chancellor  Kaya Henderson have talked lately about the importance of promoting more economic and racial diversity in schools—a subject also dear to advocates who argue more must be done to level the playing field outside of school walls. And Randi Weingarten, president of the second largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has crossed battle lines to work with reformers on new teacher evaluations and launching the Common Core State Standards.

But should we expect an armistice in the education reform war in the near future? Maybe not.

Nationally, unions and many of the policies they support are under fire like never before from former allies in the Democratic Party as well as traditional political foes. Locally, Mulgrew has fought with Mayor Michael Bloomberg over school closings, charter schools and teacher evaluations.

Philissa Cramer, editor of GothamSchools, spoke with WNYC about the election and the future of the union, which GothamSchools has been looking at in a series of stories with The Hechinger Report.

Although Mulgrew will likely coast to victory, Cramer noted that there are still “a lot of teachers who are unhappy with how things have gone in the last couple of years.” Nevertheless, the union—the largest teachers union local in the country—will probably maintain its “enormous amount of influence” in the city as mayoral candidates vie for its support and endorsement.

For more about the sources of union’s influence and how it’s likely to wield power in the future, check out the link on SchoolBook for the interview in its entirety.

Photo by Jess Loughborough/Flickr

In what may be among the first of many lawsuits over the new evaluations—which have been adopted by multiple states—the Florida teachers union is challenging the state’s use of test scores in decisions about which teachers are fired and which receive pay raises. The Florida Education Association argues the system violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses.

The debate over the new systems has often centered on the frequent errors in what’s known as value-added measurement, which can lead to effective teachers being misidentified as ineffective, and whether the potential problems for teachers outweigh the potential benefits for students.

A new paper published this week explores both sides.

Ratings for teachers based on test scores get it wrong a lot of the time. Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington-Bothell, and Susanna Loeb, of Stanford University, review previous research that finds about a quarter of teachers are likely to be misidentified as ineffective when they’re in fact effective using the test score measures.

“The error rates,” they write, “appear to be quite high.”

And yet, the researchers argue that using test scores to make high-stakes decisions about teachers’ jobs is actually a more accurate method than previous systems, which often depended on cursory classroom observations, pass rates on licensure tests, and degrees earned.

“Flawed as they are, value-added measures appear to be better predictors of student achievement than the teacher characteristics that we currently use,” the researchers write.

What to do? Goldhaber and Loeb, as researchers are wont to do, suggest more research. But they also lay out some of the trade-offs that policymakers (and now the courts) should consider.

Is firing some teachers who may not deserve to be fired worth it if it ensures more bad teachers leave the classroom and more students have the opportunity to sit in the classroom of a good teacher?

Will increasing accountability, especially if the systems are viewed as unfair, have the unintended effect of reducing collaboration among teachers and scaring away good candidates from the profession?

Will the new evaluations prompt schools of education and districts to better train teachers, or will the newly-identified struggling teachers still be left to flounder?

Finally, the researchers ask, “How will the system handle legal challenges?”

At issue in Florida are not the error rates, but the fact that teachers are receiving ratings based on test scores of students or subjects they don’t teach. “This lawsuit highlights the absurdity of the evaluation system,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, in a statement.

Goldhaber and Loeb argue that for the most part, courts will probably defer to states and districts on the new evaluations, recognizing “that value-added measures are intended to improve those systems.” But they also say that the outcome of lawsuits will depend on whether “the state or district can demonstrate that the evaluation system in question was thoughtfully designed and consistent with sound educational principles.”

“Ultimately,” the researchers conclude, “employment decisions need only be based on evaluation systems that are sufficiently valid, not perfect.”

Sarah Carr

Sarah Carr, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, went on NBC’s Education Nation on Friday to talk about the radical changes to New Orleans’ school landscape since Katrina.

The city has a higher percentage of charter schools than any other since the flood. Education Nation traveled to New Orleans last week to see how the changes are playing out on the ground.

Carr’s panel focused on the rise in the number of teachers coming to the city through alternative programs like Teach For America and the need for holistic reforms that reach parents and the broader community.

“Dartmouth! Duke! Vassar! Swag! I’m three for three!”

You may not read about rejections, but you will certainly hear plenty about them, along with much speculation about who got in and who didn’t—as well as some malicious gossip like, “I cannot believe Diana got into Yale and Stephen didn’t. Do you think she knew someone? His SAT scores were so much higher…”

Listen closely, and the list of rejected valedictorians, team captains and accomplished test-takers will go on and on. You may even hear navel-gazing parents and students who received too many thin envelopes ask themselves, “Where did we go wrong?”

We go wrong by engaging in this wrong-headed, waste-of-time conversation at all, and by comparing our kids’ test scores and GPAs, their merits and drawbacks. Sure, it’s seductive to be drawn into side-by-side comparisons and speculate about the “secret formula” for getting into top schools like Brown University, where 28,919 applicants vied for acceptances that totaled just 2,649.

In the new comedy Admission, the Princeton admissions officer played by Tina Fey is repeatedly asked to divulge that formula.

“Just be yourself,” Fey falsely answers. The film illustrates how largely unsuccessful such advice is by showing a parade of accomplished applicants falling through the floor of Princeton’s committee room and into oblivion.

Unfortunately, the movie perpetuates Ivy League angst, promoting the wrong conversation in a country where community colleges enroll more than half of the students in higher education—and where the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 with a two- or four-year college degree is just 38.7 percent.

College costs may be one reason. They’ve jumped 440 percent in the last 25 years—which is three times the rate of inflation. A year at Princeton costs $56,750. Two-thirds of students who graduated from a U.S. college in 2011 had loan debt, averaging $26,500 per borrower.

Listen to complaints about how many students are rejected from top schools with near-perfect SAT scores and it will be easy to ignore a more jarring statistic: scores on the exams used in college admissions have plummeted in recent years, suggesting that more students today are struggling with vocabulary, the meanings of words, sentence structure and math problems.

“When less than half of kids who want to go to college are prepared to do so, that system is failing,” former College Board president Gaston Caperton told The Washington Post last fall.

In reporting trips to schools in the impoverished state of Mississippi, I’ve been able to see up close the many challenges that keep higher education beyond the reach of the poor—and the poorly educated. Students there have the lowest ACT scores in the nation, averaging 18.7 points, which is well below the national mean of 21.1. The maximum score on the ACT is 36; many top colleges want to see scores of 30 or above.

You won’t see too many stories about it, though. Major media attention tends to focus on elite schools and who gets into Harvard, a topic I devoted years to covering as a higher-education reporter because editors insisted that readers find it fascinating.

The reporting reinforced my suspicion that there is almost nothing affluent parents with checkbooks at the ready won’t do—starting well before preschool—to give their progeny a leg up. That might mean hiring consultants who charge up to $40,000 to orchestrate college applications, or sending their teenagers off to a four-day application “boot camp” that costs $14,000.

Digging a little deeper, I learned a great deal from admissions deans like Harvard’s William Fitzsimmons, who never allowed me to sit in on committee discussions weighing the merits of applicants, but invited me to a meeting about how low-income students were faring at Harvard.

The answer? They often struggle mightily, a fact that elite college presidents have picked up on; some have spoken out about the need to attract more students who don’t come from affluent backgrounds and do more to make them feel comfortable.

The strategy sounds great, but low-income students with top grades and scores often don’t even apply to the most prestigious schools.

In fact, only a tiny fraction of students even consider applying to or attending elite institutions, according to Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, and now head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

“A few years ago, I met a young woman who had been ostracized by her parents because she only got into Wesleyan, [the University of] Chicago and Swarthmore,” said Levine, adding that the problem is also a changing economy that requires postsecondary education.

“When four percent of the college-age population attended higher education in 1900, everyone shopped at Tiffany’s,” he said. “With more than 70 percent of high-school grads entering postsecondary education [now], it’s more like shopping at Walmart—so there is greater pressure to attend a university that marks or differentiates one from the Walmart shoppers.”

At The Hechinger Report, we focus on some of the more urgent issues in higher education, like college costs, access and completion. We’ve looked at schools that are doing a particularly good job at integrating students of color on campus, along with those who have work to do. We’ve questioned why some colleges may be misrepresenting admissions statistics, and tried to keep an eye on the obstacles in the way of President Barack Obama’s laudable goal of getting more Americans to earn college degrees.

We’ve also reported how a community-college degree can be lucrative—and that significant numbers of grads are getting better jobs and earning more at the start of their careers than those with bachelor’s degrees.

Beginning a new conversation about admissions is easier said than done, although I highly recommend the work of Lloyd Thacker at The Education Conservancy as a starting point. I’ve given a copy of his terrific book College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy to many a friend and family member.

But as I contemplate the hundreds of thousands of dollars we may be shelling out to educate the teenagers in my family, I’ve also recommended The Neurotic Parent’s Guide to College Admissions: Strategies for Helicoptering, Hot-Housing & Micromanaging.

In his review of Admission, New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott notes that he is “the father of a high school junior, paying my tithe to the test prep gods while preparing to sacrifice most of my worldly goods on the altar of the liberal arts…”

Scott added: “How could anyone make light of the brutal, capricious system by which our young people are judged and sorted?”

People do so because the target is an easy one, and the conversation isn’t changing—though it should be.

I asked Thacker—who said he doesn’t plan to see Admission—for some ideas. His long list includes guidance for parents, teachers and students on how to change “the market-drenched admissions process,” which he says imperils qualities like curiosity and risk-taking by emphasizing “where a student goes to college over what a student does in college.”

Sounds like a good start to me.

Educational games, apps, data dashboards and social media were touted as the next big things in panels with titles like “EdTech Entrepreneurs: Are They the Next Superheroes?” and “Building Schools Into the Innovation Ecosystem.” The main theme at the SXSWedu conference—which is linked to the better known music and technology festivals—was how these new technologies are poised to make the learning experience for students more “personalized.” With data gathered and organized by new software systems, games and apps, the idea is that teachers will know their students better than ever and be able to pinpoint exactly where they’ve gone off course and, the hope is, what they need to get back on track.

The panelists were passionate and people were excited.

“The market is going to be the best forum that’s going to solve the problems [of education]. Not government. Not NGOs,” said Stephen Coller, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation during a panel about “Big Data” (The foundation is one of the many contributors to The Hechinger Report.)

Somewhat less well attended than the sessions devoted to tips on how to make a profit in the ed-tech sector was the screening of a documentary, “The New Public,” about a school in a high-poverty Brooklyn neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. The film, one of several that screened at the conference, held up a more complicated—and less certain—picture of what’s needed to solve some of education’s most intractable problems. The filmmaker, Jyllian Gunther, followed the lives of students, teachers and administrators as they launched a new high school, Brooklyn Community Arts & Media (BCAM), one of the hundreds of new small schools opened under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.

Like the technologies being promoted at SXSWedu, smaller schools were also meant to personalize the learning experience for students; the hope was that replacing large, comprehensive high schools with smaller school communities would make education more intimate and student-focused, and would help boost graduation rates. (Early on, the Gates Foundation helped fund the small school movement, but as research on the effectiveness of the reform came back mixed, the foundation abandoned the idea.)

Gunther’s cameras, including the ones students took home with them to film scenes with their parents and siblings, captured how difficult it is to get education right for the neediest students.

For the school leaders and teachers at BCAM, personalized learning didn’t involve apps or data dashboards. They took a less high-tech approach: getting to know the mostly African-American students and their families well during meetings and home visits, taking seriously their hopes and concerns about their own education (even letting students give input on punishments for peers who misbehave), and taking into account their culture and experiences outside school, including incorporating hip hop and dance into the curriculum and providing sessions on self-esteem for girls worried about their body image.

It was attention that the students had often found lacking in their previous schools. And yet it often wasn’t enough. Gunther returned to the school to check in on how the freshman she’d met four years earlier were faring their senior year. Many had left. Others who had once planned on college were struggling to make it to graduation at all. In a particularly heart-rending storyline, a once-buoyant student who wrestled with his sexual identity became more and more dejected as he received college rejection letters, one after the other.

In the fourth year, test prep became a more prominent feature of the school as teachers and administrators reflected that they should have put more emphasis on academic rigor—not just getting to know and engage their students. Perhaps some of the new technology coming down the pike could have helped them better juggle the balance between challenging, engaging and caring for their students.

The personalized learning that ed-tech pioneers are talking about now involves using data points like test scores, attendance and, perhaps someday, information about students gathered from games or their internet searches, to home in what students need academically. Maybe more high-tech systems and detailed data would have helped teachers recognize how far behind many students were on the path to graduation.

But would it have helped teachers figure out how to help a student deal with her rage issues so she could get over her frustrations in science class? Or how to keep a young student who was mocked for being gay at school and at home from losing hope and help him stay focused on his strengths? Or how to salvage the academic career of a student whose prospects once looked promising and who suddenly stopped caring about his future?

The film doesn’t make an argument for or against any particular reforms. Instead, the educators at BCAM discovered that even when you know nearly everything about a student, solutions to help them succeed can still be elusive.

Sara Neufeld

Sarah Carr

Jon Marcus

Sarah Garland

Jill Barshay

Five Report writers are among the winners of the 2012 National Awards for Education Reporting, announced Tuesday by the Education Writers Association.

Sarah Carr won first prize for beat reporting, for stories covering k-12 education in the South. Carr’s stories, which span the topics of school choice, segregation, and teacher effectiveness in Mississippi and Louisiana, have been published by Time and The Atlantic.

Jon Marcus shared second prize in the same category, for comprehensive coverage of higher education. Marcus’s work frequently appears in Time, CNN Money and NBC News.

Sara Neufeld, a contributing writer for The Hechinger Report, was awarded a special citation for her collaboration with the NJ Spotlight and WNYC for “A Promise To Renew in Newark,” a series examining the turnaround attempts of a low-performing school in New Jersey.

Sarah Garland and Jill Barshay were also awarded a special citation for their investigative reporting project “Teaching the Teachers NYC,” a series with Beth Fertig of WNYC that examined the ongoing professional development of teachers in New York City.

The 62 winning entries, selected from hundreds of submissions, recognize the best education journalism produced by print, radio and online media outlets across the country.

Today is the day that those automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that have been coming since August 2011 are finally set to kick in. And U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been a chief spokesman for the administration on the impact of the cuts on domestic programs—and landed in some pretty hot water with fact checkers.

Earlier this week, the White House put out job loss estimates, including for K-12 schools, and Duncan backed them up on Sunday’s political talk shows. However, it’s really too early to know exactly how many layoffs, furloughs, or programmatic cuts will result from sequestration (which would represent the largest cut to federal K-12 aid in recent history). School districts—not to mention states, and the federal government—are still hammering out their spending plans for this year. Schools don’t typically send out Reduction in Force (RIF) notices until March or April.

That means teachers won’t lose their positions this school year, although some districts are beginning to contemplate layoffs for next year, as well as cuts to things like professional development, according to this report by the American Association of School Administrators. Another survey by the organization, released last year, showed that many school districts were trying to carefully plan for the cuts, to minimize the impact on students and staff.

Besides, state and local money makes up the vast majority (about 90 percent) of a district’s budget, so school district officials could be watching their state legislatures just as closely (more closely?) than they are watching Congress when it comes to deciding just how many teaching positions they can fund next year.

Given all that, I asked Secretary Duncan earlier today, at an event at an elementary school in Takoma Park, Md., if he still stands by the estimates the White House put out earlier this week.

Here’s what he told me:

“Obviously all these potential cuts are not coming at a time when states and districts are flush. We lost a couple hundred thousand teacher jobs over the past few years.” And he said “the vast majority of [district] money goes to people. There simply aren’t too many other places to go.”

He added that districts have the option of furloughing teachers rather than laying them off, which he said would still be detrimental to kids. “If your money is going to people, people are going to get hurt. These are estimates, we’ll see, this is the potential impact. I think again, you’ll start to see over time now, these notices going out.”

I asked him if he was worried that by putting estimates out there, rather than waiting for hard and fast numbers, he had undermined the administration’s (and advocates’) arguments that the sequester could be very damaging for schools.

“My job is to be clear and straight and transparent,” Duncan said. “We’ve never said that this is what’s going to happen. …We’ve always said this is what might happen. And sadly, this is what might happen.” (On CBS’s Face the Nation Duncan said that there are “literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.” School district officials: Have you sent those notes? Or do you typically wait until March or April before announcing layoffs?)

More background on the cuts: The pain won’t be felt evenly everywhere. Some states, like Connecticut, don’t rely very much on federal funding for education, while others, like New Mexico, count much more on the feds. But overall, state budgets are largely rebounding from the recent recession, Michael Griffith, a state budget guru, told my colleague Andrew Ujifusa of State EdWatch fame.

The impact of sequestration appears to be equally murky when it comes to the $8 billion Head Start program, which helps low-income families cover the cost of preschool. The cuts will be far more immediate here, although it’s unclear what impact that will have on children served.

Here’s the administration’s take:

“We have a situation where we’re looking at the possibility of 70,000 young children losing their access to Head Start and Early Head Start, with teachers being laid off and teaching assistants being laid off,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a press conference today.

But, as with K-12, it sounds like local implementation could be key to how Head Start programs absorb the cuts. Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for HHS, told me this week that under the sequester, Head Start programs that don’t operate in the summer could either end their current school year earlier than planned, or delay the start of the next school year to save money. Year-round programs would likely decide not to fill openings after children age out, he added. And grantees could also cut transportation services to find savings, he said. Some Head Start students may have no other way of getting to their programs. All of those steps would have a major impact on Head Start kids and families, of course.

The cuts may not be in place for long anyway. In fact, Rep. John Kline, the chairman of the House education committee, is betting they’ll be replaced with a broader budget agreement, possibly this year.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor, gave $1 million to some school-board candidates in Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of Amanda Cogdon)

But the involvement of national school reform players in local district politics is a trend likely to accelerate now that would-be reformers have won major policy victories at the state and federal levels, experts and advocates say. Upcoming races in Denver and Newark, N.J., may be the next target for national groups like Rhee’s advocacy organization, StudentsFirst, and major donors like Bloomberg and his former school chancellor, Joel Klein, who has also contributed money to the Los Angeles race.

“A lot of the reform success started at the federal level with Race to the Top, it moved to states and now it’s very much in the implementation phase at the district level,” said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), an advocacy group that supports charter schools and teacher accountability. “How implementation is handled is important to a lot of people.”

In the case of Los Angeles, donors like Bloomberg, Rhee, and local philanthropists such as Eli Broad (who has been among the many funders of The Hechinger Report), are giving to a slate of school-board candidates who support charter schools, new teacher evaluations based on student test scores, and overhauling teacher tenure. Although Los Angeles is already piloting new evaluations to be launched next year, the teachers union has resisted the inclusion of test scores as a major factor in the rating system. (Student achievement measures will make up 30 percent of a teacher’s rating under a system negotiated this year with the union.)

Reformers are also concerned that the city’s charter schools might be adversely affected if the make-up of the school board becomes more union-friendly.

Outside participation in local education politics is not entirely a new phenomenon. National groups were involved in state races in last November’s elections, and national donors gave generously to candidates in last year’s school-board race in New Orleans. “The extent that you have Bloomberg giving a million dollars, that’s new,” said Sarah Reckhow, a political scientist at Michigan State University and author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics. “But the base and the networks and the foundation for getting to this point [have] built over a couple of election cycles.”

A decade ago, fights for mayoral control of school districts—which took power out of the hands of many local school boards—also occasionally attracted outside involvement from national foundations or other advocates. “It’s where you don’t have mayoral control where you see the outside money going into the local school boards,” said Jeffrey Henig, a political scientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is beginning research on the involvement of national groups in local education politics. “In places where you don’t have the friendly mayor as your ally, this becomes a backup strategy.”

The local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has been among the most vocal opponents of the participation of large national donors in the race. The union is supporting a separate slate of candidates, including incumbent Steve Zimmer, who helped push through the new teacher evaluation system and who last year proposed a two-month moratorium on the approval of new charter schools. The measure was defeated.

Voters “do not need outsiders deciding who is best to sit on the LAUSD Board of Education,” Warren Fletcher, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said in a statement quoted by the Los Angeles Times.

Henig says the increased outside involvement in local education politics could become a concern. “There are some legitimate questions about democracy and local community values,” he said. “In a lot of instances, the incumbents are not entrenched interests, they are responding to a constituency that elected them.”

Yet despite the attention the Los Angeles election is receiving, it’s unclear whether the outside cash will make much difference in the outcome of the races. The money from Bloomberg, Rhee and other donors is mostly going toward television commercials. In an off-year school board election that will likely turn out few voters, Reckhow said knocking on doors is usually a better strategy.

And the involvement of wealthy outsiders could create a backlash, Williams of DFER said: “The money could also be what tanks a candidate, if that’s what the storyline is with voters.”

The findings come at a time when nearly every state around the country has adopted some sort of significant education reform in the past two years, including revising academic standards and implementing new teacher evaluation systems. Advocates say that many of these reforms, such as merit pay and the elimination of seniority-based layoffs, will help attract a higher-quality candidate to the profession.

But Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a nonprofit group that promotes higher academic standards, said he was concerned by the job satisfaction numbers and what they said about the general public’s view of educators. “What struck me most,” he said during a conference call hosted by MetLife to discuss the findings, is that “they are operating in an environment of public discourse that is often focused on blame.”

The survey also found that three-quarters of principals said that their job was too complex. “We’re asking principals to do a lot more with – at best – the same, or fewer resources,” Mel Riddile, an associate director at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said on the call. “They’re encountering a perfect storm of Common Core implementation, new teacher evaluations and state accountability systems.”

Both Riddile and Cohen stressed that full implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a new set of k-12 academic standards that 48 states have adopted, would be a huge shift for virtually all schools.

Ninety percent of principals and 93 percent of teachers reported that teachers in their schools had the skills necessary for implementing the new standards, according to the survey. They were less sure, however, of the impact Common Core would have. Just 22 percent of principals and 17 percent of teachers said they were very confident the standards would increase student performance.

“Different surveys produce different findings of how supportive teachers are of the standards,” Cohen said. “None of this is going to happen quickly. These are long term changes.”