The Education Gadfly Weekly

Alison Kadlec, Will Friedman, and Amber Ott
Public Agenda
September 2007

In an age of increasing global competitiveness, America's economic survival hinges on improving its math and science education. That, more or less, is the opening sentence of about 17,000 recent reports and op-eds, all of them decrying the decrepit state of U.S. math and science education. But while policymakers have started to respond to such warnings--see the America Competes Act, for instance, recently signed by the president--this report shows that students and parents aren't persuaded. Public Agenda asked 1,400 parents and 1,300 students in Kansas and Missouri what they think about the state of math, science, and technology (MST) education. Sixty-five percent of parents strongly agreed that "students with advanced math and science skills will have a big advantage when it comes to work and college opportunities," and 57 percent believed that the U.S. is "far behind other countries" in math and science education. Yet, surprisingly, 70 percent also believed that their local schools were "doing a good job of preparing students," and only 31 percent thought their schools needed to improve math and science "as quickly as possible." Student views were similarly contradictory. Sixty-three percent believed that, to succeed after high school, "it's crucial for most of today's students to learn higher-level math skills," yet when asked whether all students should actually take advanced math courses, only 26 percent answered in the affirmative. (This latter stance may have a certain logic, but it certainly doesn't square with the students' stated belief in the importance of advanced math education.) The authors call this disconnect the "urgency gap." It should be noted, however, that the gap is smaller among minorities. Over 60 percent of black and Hispanic parents believed that their students were not learning basic math, compared with only 42 percent of white parents. One hopes the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which commissioned the study to inform their MST initiatives in Kansas City, can improve this glum situation in the coming years. Read the report here.

Nancy Hoffman, Joel Vargas, Andrea Venezia, and Marc S. Miller, eds
September 2007

According to this new book as well as a number of earlier volumes, Americans who lack a postsecondary education will lag behind in the global economy. But a lot of Americans, as we know, aren't getting to college and a lot more aren't staying there. In these pages, however, you can find innumerable recommendations to fix that. And while its chapters offer lots of as yet untried remedies, it's the current efforts that are most interesting. For example, an early college high school program in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio, sits on the campus of the University of Dayton, a location that automatically immerses low-income students in a postsecondary environment (see here). The editors are themselves involved with other such programs. In New York City, the CollegeNOW program allows high-school juniors and seniors to jointly enroll in the City University of New York. States such as Oklahoma and Ohio sponsor high-school skill exams, usually for tenth and eleventh graders, to assess competencies in math and to determine what needs to be fixed before students move on. Many of these programs are promising, but they are relatively new and therefore lack information about outcomes. Nonetheless, this book offers lots of solid information. You can find it here.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Directorate of Education  September 2007

Each year the OECD releases education data on 30 member countries. We've covered them in past years (see here, for example). The 2007 report looks at attendance and achievement, funding, the state of lifelong learning, and conditions for pupils and teachers. Some interesting bits: the U.S. spends on each public-school student, during his or her K-12 educational career, an average of about $100,000. That's one of highest amounts in the OECD. Finland and South Korea, whose students are always at the top in international tests, each spend less than the OECD average of $81,485. Teaching salaries in the U.S. are high in absolute terms, but low relative to GDP. American teachers, however, spend more time in the classroom than other OECD teachers. U.S. elementary teachers provide 1,080 hours of instruction per year, 200+ hours more than the OECD average. In higher education, American college students spend more for tuition than their counterparts elsewhere, but they also receive more financial aid (loans and scholarships). Only 54 percent of U.S. students who enter college will actually graduate (tying with New Zealand for last place). But the U.S. is still the top destination for study-abroad participants. More interesting facts are available here.

Things are changing at the St. Louis Public Schools. The special administrative board (which now oversees the city's schools; see here) replaced Kenneth Brostron, the district's longtime lawyer. An in-house lawyer--one who is much cheaper than Brostron and his firm--will begin work in October. For the past four years, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Public Schools has spent almost $11 million on legal fees. That's roughly $75 per student per year: twice as much--and in some cases 10 times as much--as what legal fees cost other school districts across the country. Of course, because of overregulation (not to mention our country's litigious culture) school districts are forced to spend huge amounts of precious time and money to protect against potentially devastating lawsuits. St. Louis, though, is a case-study in mismanagement. The real victims are the students. Last year alone, St. Louis Public Schools spent $2.8 million on legal fees but only $236,000 on new library books. Seems like Mound City's new school management won't tolerate such backward priorities.

"Spending millions on legal advice," by David Hunn and Steve Giegerich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 2007

When Superintendent Paul Vallas left Philadelphia to take over New Orleans' Recovery School District, he wasn't just changing cities--he was also changing worlds. With over 90 percent of the 12,000 students in the New Orleans district mired in poverty, Vallas says his schools must "begin to provide the type of services you would normally expect to be provided at home." This means serving three meals a day, for instance, and providing basic dental and eye care. Such paternalistic measures have been successful so far and helped bring the truancy rate down from 50 percent at the end of last school year to about 15 percent today. Parents, one assumes, finally see some value in getting their children to school. Vallas has managed to find some time for academics, too. He has recruited top-notch teachers, reduced class sizes, and replaced nearly every high-school principal. With local and national governments botching badly the recovery efforts, though, one wonders when Vallas will be able to shift roles from part-time parent to full-time educator. The sooner, of course, the better. 

"A Tamer of Schools Has Plan in New Orleans," by Adam Nossiter, New York Times, September 23, 2007

The government released the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores on Tuesday, and Mark Schneider, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, summed up the news in these words: "We're making slow and steady progress in reading, and we're doing much better in math."

But what is really going on under the headlines? Journalists expect pundits to provide instant analysis, but here are five questions worthy of leisurely study over the coming months and years.

1. Why is the nation making good progress in math (tripling the percentage of fourth graders "at or above proficient" since 1990) but not in reading (which is basically flat since 1992)? Some suggest that math is easier to teach than reading, especially to limited-English students and others with restricted vocabularies. Or that schools have a greater impact on math than on reading. Or perhaps there's stronger curricular alignment in math, and over a longer period of time, with state standards, state curricula, and  NAEP all pegged (for better or worse) to the doctrines of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards.
   

2. Why isn't the math progress seen on NAEP showing up on international exams? Perhaps our definition of "math" differs from that of the rest of the world. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless told USA Today, "We have made some progress in a few areas in mathematics, but there are some very important areas, unfortunately, that are not covered by NAEP."
   

3. Why are we making small gains in fourth-grade reading but none in eighth grade? Since 1998, average reading scores for fourth graders are up 6 points (with four of those points coming during the pre-NCLB years), but flat in eighth grade. Are "scientifically-based reading" efforts paying off in the early grades? If so, will we eventually see greater gains at the eighth-grade level? Or is the middle-school slump a signal that students are not building the vocabularies they need in order to comprehend effectively--because schools aren't offering enough subject matter content in the form of history, literature, science, and the arts, right from the start? If early reading skills are honed on meaningless "readers" and the kids never encounter George Washington or Stuart Little, they won't have the background knowledge to understand middle-school courses.
   

4. Why aren't our top students making gains in reading? The reading abilities of fourth-graders at the 90^th percentile have stagnated since 2003; in eighth grade, students at the 90^th and 75^th percentiles actually lost ground since then. Is No Child Left Behind's focus on bringing up the lowest performers leading schools to ignore their high achievers?
   

5. What's the secret to Massachusetts's success? Not only is the Bay State number one in every category; its gains since 1998 are also the most impressive in the nation. Consider fourth-grade reading, where Massachusetts's 2007 score bests the next state by five points (equal to half a grade level), and where its 13-point gain since 1998 leads the nation, too. Does this show that a combination of well-implemented standards-based reform, intensive scientifically-based reading instruction, higher standards for teachers, and serious results-based accountability can yield dramatic improvements in achievement?

Are charter schools the new bargaining chips in parent/school board negotiations? It would seem so. After the Palo Alto school board told parents that, sorry, they weren't going to start a Mandarin-immersion program, the parents threatened to start their own Mandarin charter school. The superintendent figured that a charter school, of which Palo Alto currently has none, would cost the district $1,100 to $5,000 per student (legal bills would be extra). Money talks; the school board reversed itself and the immersion program was approved. School board candidate Melissa Caswell wasn't pleased, though. She said starting charter schools just to appeal to affluent parents isn't "in the spirit of why charter schools were established." No? Are charter schools not a way for parents, of any income bracket, to exercise choice, especially when school officials aren't meeting a perceived need? Certainly authorizers shouldn't approve charter schools willy-nilly. But giving power to the parents is what school choice is all about.

"Charter schools loom large over cushy districts," by Patty Fisher, San Jose Mercury News, September 24, 2007

The most distinctive thing about Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, a documentary that debuted Tuesday night on HBO, is that it actually adds something valuable to the discussion about race and education. Worthwhile contributions to that discussion are all too rare.

Fifty years ago this week, Little Rock's Central High School was integrated when nine black students were escorted to class by federal troops. The film puts a modern lens on a place that most Americans know only through history. Of course, for the families, students, and teachers whose lives revolve around Central's daily operations, the school doesn't exist in the past--it exists today as an American high school facing the same problems as other urban schools across the land.

Filmmakers Brent and Craig Renaud, Little Rock natives, seem to understand that. Their opening footage from 1957, of an angry white mob, quickly shifts to footage from 2007. And that's where the story stays; rather than dwelling in the past, the Renauds are concerned with the present, and with the possible future.

What becomes quickly apparent is that Central High today is racially divided. Comparisons to the racial divisions of 1957, however, are illogical. No angry white mobs crowd the parking lots after class, no one shouts racial epithets, no politicians go on television to support segregation. Racism as a "respectable" ideology is gone.

And so what we don't learn from the documentary is that white students and black students at Central don't get along. When we do see them interacting, the relations are positive. Thing is, we don't see white and black students interacting all that much. And therein lies the new separation at Central High--a self-imposed segregation that plays out in the hallways, the cafeteria, the buses, and the classrooms.

Distressing? Perhaps. But as sundry students point out, "that's just the way it is." In this way, they are perhaps wiser than Central's principal, Nancy Rousseau, who announces at the start of one school day that it will be "mix-up day." She then walks around at lunchtime, prodding kids to eat their sandwiches next to someone of a different race. Lots of eyes are rolled.

A more serious problem is that black students at Central High are, by and large, not enrolled in the rigorous AP classes. They are, by and large, doing a lot worse academically than their white peers. The civil rights struggle of Central High circa 2007, thus, is much the same as that of other schools across the land: closing the achievement gap.

We meet Antron, an 18-year-old black male who aspires to be a boxer and cannot read. He's failing all his classes, mostly because he declines to show up for them, which means he will have to repeat ninth-grade--again. Sadly, it's likely that he will drop out.

Not all of Antron's problems are of his own making, of course. We learn that his mom abruptly kicked him out of the house, and that he had to move in with his sister. Indeed, such stories abound at Central High, and some of their details are much more distressing than familial discord and an unexpected change of address. A teacher asks her students how many have had a family member in jail and all the black hands in the class shoot up. One student recounts how his brother was killed: tied-up, beaten, and set on fire.

It's troubling that 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds have to deal with such nasty facets of humanity. It's troubling that many of them have parents who are not around,  are on drugs,  are incarcerated, or simply don't care what happens to their children at school.

It's troubling, but it's happening. The challenge for public schools is dealing with it: taking students as they are, asking them to leave their traumatic problems at the school door, giving them  a rigorous education every day, and accepting no excuses.

Such a prescription, some say, flies in the face of reality. That's wrong. Such a prescription is the only realistic way to help the neediest students. The alternative--hoping for blighted neighborhoods to heal, waiting for broken families to mend,, expecting crime miraculously to cease--is not only unrealistic but also immoral. How many kids get sacrificed while we wait and hope?

And yet, what we see at Central High is discouraging. Why are teachers asking their black students to talk about someone they know who was murdered? Why are classes full of black students debating whether it is the "white man" or their own communities that bear the responsibility for their poor grades? Why is a principal interrupting an AP class to cry in front of her students while she talks about race?

Empathy and emotion are wonderful things, but alone they don't solve problems. In fact, such displays and classroom "dialogues" are more likely to reinforce unhealthy stereotypes than overturn them. Black students at Central, and around the country, shouldn't be talking about race--they should be talking about math, geography, and history, including the events in Little Rock half a century ago. If we want to see black and white students sitting together in the lunchroom, the efforts must start in the classroom.

The film shows that, despite Central's unique history, its racial problems today are not unique. In this way, Central's historical significance has not defined its present and no longer distinguishes its day-to-day operations from those of other large, public high schools across the country.

No, its students are regular public-school students, its problems par for the course. Central High School has a past that deserves to be remembered. But things are different now, the civil rights battles have changed, and new legacies will need to be created.

Without ever asking the question, Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later asks it: what will be Central High School's legacy 50 years from today?

A version of this article ran in the September 26 edition of National Review Online.

Alison Kadlec, Will Friedman, and Amber Ott
Public Agenda
September 2007

In an age of increasing global competitiveness, America's economic survival hinges on improving its math and science education. That, more or less, is the opening sentence of about 17,000 recent reports and op-eds, all of them decrying the decrepit state of U.S. math and science education. But while policymakers have started to respond to such warnings--see the America Competes Act, for instance, recently signed by the president--this report shows that students and parents aren't persuaded. Public Agenda asked 1,400 parents and 1,300 students in Kansas and Missouri what they think about the state of math, science, and technology (MST) education. Sixty-five percent of parents strongly agreed that "students with advanced math and science skills will have a big advantage when it comes to work and college opportunities," and 57 percent believed that the U.S. is "far behind other countries" in math and science education. Yet, surprisingly, 70 percent also believed that their local schools were "doing a good job of preparing students," and only 31 percent thought their schools needed to improve math and science "as quickly as possible." Student views were similarly contradictory. Sixty-three percent believed that, to succeed after high school, "it's crucial for most of today's students to learn higher-level math skills," yet when asked whether all students should actually take advanced math courses, only 26 percent answered in the affirmative. (This latter stance may have a certain logic, but it certainly doesn't square with the students' stated belief in the importance of advanced math education.) The authors call this disconnect the "urgency gap." It should be noted, however, that the gap is smaller among minorities. Over 60 percent of black and Hispanic parents believed that their students were not learning basic math, compared with only 42 percent of white parents. One hopes the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which commissioned the study to inform their MST initiatives in Kansas City, can improve this glum situation in the coming years. Read the report here.

Nancy Hoffman, Joel Vargas, Andrea Venezia, and Marc S. Miller, eds
September 2007

According to this new book as well as a number of earlier volumes, Americans who lack a postsecondary education will lag behind in the global economy. But a lot of Americans, as we know, aren't getting to college and a lot more aren't staying there. In these pages, however, you can find innumerable recommendations to fix that. And while its chapters offer lots of as yet untried remedies, it's the current efforts that are most interesting. For example, an early college high school program in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio, sits on the campus of the University of Dayton, a location that automatically immerses low-income students in a postsecondary environment (see here). The editors are themselves involved with other such programs. In New York City, the CollegeNOW program allows high-school juniors and seniors to jointly enroll in the City University of New York. States such as Oklahoma and Ohio sponsor high-school skill exams, usually for tenth and eleventh graders, to assess competencies in math and to determine what needs to be fixed before students move on. Many of these programs are promising, but they are relatively new and therefore lack information about outcomes. Nonetheless, this book offers lots of solid information. You can find it here.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Directorate of Education  September 2007

Each year the OECD releases education data on 30 member countries. We've covered them in past years (see here, for example). The 2007 report looks at attendance and achievement, funding, the state of lifelong learning, and conditions for pupils and teachers. Some interesting bits: the U.S. spends on each public-school student, during his or her K-12 educational career, an average of about $100,000. That's one of highest amounts in the OECD. Finland and South Korea, whose students are always at the top in international tests, each spend less than the OECD average of $81,485. Teaching salaries in the U.S. are high in absolute terms, but low relative to GDP. American teachers, however, spend more time in the classroom than other OECD teachers. U.S. elementary teachers provide 1,080 hours of instruction per year, 200+ hours more than the OECD average. In higher education, American college students spend more for tuition than their counterparts elsewhere, but they also receive more financial aid (loans and scholarships). Only 54 percent of U.S. students who enter college will actually graduate (tying with New Zealand for last place). But the U.S. is still the top destination for study-abroad participants. More interesting facts are available here.