The Education Gadfly Weekly

Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services
September 2002

The Gadfly has previously grumped that Standard & Poor's much-discussed School Evaluation Services (SES) left something to be desired. (See, for example, Ray Domanico's guest editorial from November 2001 at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=82#1249.) The biggest problem then was that the data SES provided to its two main client states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, were all district wide, not school-specific. Our spirits lifted when SES issued terrific school-level reports on charter schools sponsored by Central Michigan University. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=50#1377.) Now we're even cheerier, for the latest evolution of SES analytic offerings is getting really useful. New district-level AND school-level reports for Michigan are accompanied by flexible analytic tools that can be accessed by policymakers, educators, analysts, and parents alike. You'll find a general description of these new offerings at
http://ses.standardandpoors.com/ and a revealing new analysis of Michigan school districts at http://ses.standardandpoors.com/pdf/mi_findings.pdf ("Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends"). Particularly tantalizing is S&P's newly developed "performance cost index," a way of comparing the dollar cost of attaining various education results, such as high-school graduation or passing levels on the Michigan assessment. Also available in this report is a discussion of Michigan districts that "achieve more with less", i.e. that get extra educational bang for the buck. Better still, if you poke into the Michigan portion of the SES website, you can now get down to the building level for every public school in the state and there you can learn a lot about their performance on state tests, that performance disaggregated by student group (as NCLB requires), staffing ratios and more, including comparisons of individual schools to their counties and the state. It's still not perfect; for example, cost data are not available at the building level, there's no simplified "school report card" for parents, and some other things one might want to know about a school (such as its teachers' qualifications) are not there yet, either. Nor does it track performance against specific academic standards or give teachers (and parents) feedback on their own students. (Other excellent systems do, such as Project Achieve, which you can find at www.projectachieve.com, and Schoolnet, at www.schoolnet.com.) But S&P's SES is emerging as a terrific building-and-district-level information system and the only one we've seen that seeks to link school-system performance to the cost of producing it.

The Century Foundation
September 2002

If school choice were ice cream, this new 250-page report from the Century Foundation might be compared with slightly sour skim milk. It's a commission product, issued by a panel chaired by former U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, a group that seems to have exhumed the worst social engineering ideas of the past four decades while dumping all over real school choice. We'll have more to say about it in an upcoming Gadfly. If you can't wait for the fuller review, surf to http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Detail.asp?ItemID=168.

Noel White, Cathy Ringstaff and Loretta Kelley, WestEd
2002

WestEd has produced a short report reviewing extant research on the relationship between technology and learning. Because it is difficult to control for all the variables that affect learning, such research is basically inconclusive, but WestEd sought to identify the conditions under which technology seems to bring the greatest returns for students. They describe ten such conditions, ranging from the predictable (provide adequate, appropriate professional development and equipment; integrate technology within the curricular framework) to the slightly more noteworthy (change teacher beliefs about learning and teaching; include technology as "one piece of the puzzle"-the other pieces being accompanying reforms at the classroom, school and district levels). As the authors acknowledge, "perhaps not surprisingly, these conditions for enhancing the value of technology investments are essentially the conditions for improving student learning in general." You'll find a PDF edition of this report at http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/kn-02-01.pdf. The longer literature review on which this report is based can be found at http://www.WestEd.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619.

Public Agenda
September 2002

In collaboration with the National Constitution Center, Public Agenda has released this interesting and, for the most part, reassuring study of Americans' attitudes toward their Constitution and the principles enshrined therein. Based on a summer '02 survey of 1500 adults, this 66-page report confirms that Americans have deep respect for their Constitution and the governmental system it ordained, even if they don't regard themselves as very knowledgeable about it. Few find America perfect-and people want their children to be taught history "warts and all"-but the nation's failings are generally seen as incomplete fulfillment of its principles and aspirations rather than something basically awry in those principles. The survey shows post-9/11 Americans generally willing to empower government to root out threats to the national security, but it also reveals the expected divisions over specific policy issues such as abortion. You can find it on-line at http://www.publicagenda.org/specials/constitution/constitution.htm.

edited by M. Suzanne Donovan and Christopher T. Cross, National Research Council
2002

As Congress debates reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) later this year and into next, reports like "Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education" by the National Research Council will receive much attention. The main point of this hefty volume, issued by the Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, is that minority youngsters who are ill-prepared for school should first receive some quality classroom instruction and social support such as tutoring before being channeled into special education programs. IDEA should not become a perverse safety net for schools and communities that have failed to teach children basic skills. This report also reminds all who seek to shrink the achievement gap between white and minority students that the effort must start at the onset of their education, or even earlier. According to the Committee, "there is substantial evidence with regard to both behavior and achievement that early identification and intervention is more effective than later identification and intervention." Despite this fact, the report continues, "the current special education identification process relies on a 'wait-to-fail' principle that both increases the likelihood that children will fail because they do not receive early supports and decreases the effectiveness of supports once they are received." To meet the needs of at-risk children as well as those of gifted students, the Committee urges making certain that teacher licensing and certification requirements call for training in effective intervention methods to assist students who fail to meet minimum academic standards-or who exceed them. You'll find plenty to chew on in this report, available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10128.html.

National Center for Education Statistics
August 2002

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) used its "fast response survey system" to develop this report on alternative schools and kindred programs operating within public school systems. These turn out to be fairly widespread-almost 11,000 such schools and programs running in 39 percent of school systems and serving some 613,000 youngsters, mostly at the secondary level. You can learn a lot about these exceptionally varied programs from this report, including their entrance and exit criteria, the nature of their offerings, staffing and arrangements with other agencies. You cannot, however, learn some things you might find most interesting, such as how they are administered and how many are outsourced to private operators. You'll find a PDF copy at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002004.pdf.

Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education, California state legislature
2002

One can never be sure that an education "master plan" will amount to more than the paper it's printed on, but California is at it again. After several years of labor, a joint committee of the legislature has given birth to this 240-page behemoth, which seeks both to overhaul the state's famed (but now four-decade-old) higher-education master plan and to offer the state a 20-years-into-the-future blueprint for K-16 education. Much heavy lifting lies ahead for any of this to become real, including such controversial provisions as turning the state's elected superintendent of public instruction into a gubernatorial appointee. Two years of (voluntary) public pre-school are sought by the authors, as is mandatory kindergarten, an end to "emergency" credentials for teachers, and so forth-all totaling 56 main recommendations and countless sub-recommendations. A few flashes of boldness can be found in these pages but, for the most part, this is a mainstream, "more of the same," "do it within the existing system" document that's long on regulations and resources and exceptionally thin on unconventional ways of doing things. You'll find little here that smacks of results-based accountability, for example, and virtually nothing that calls for choice, competition or the entry of teachers and principals via unconventional routes. You can download the report from www.sen.ca.gov/masterplan/.

Despite being branded racist, sexist and irrelevant to contemporary students' lives, the so-called "Great Books" are making a great comeback in some unlikely places: community colleges with largely minority student bodies, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, and Native American reservations, to name just a few. The appeal of the classics, the founders of the Great Books programs claim, is the same today as when Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois studied them: they arm students with the knowledge needed to participate fully as citizens in our democracy. "'I Sit With Shakespeare and He Winces Not': The Great Books and the Burgeoning of Citizenship," by Katherine A. Kersten, American Experiment Quarterly, Summer 2002.

While standards-based reform is now the law of the land, teachers often complain that they don't have the resources they need to make the reform strategy work. To help bridge the yawning gap between standards and what actually happens in the classroom, the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City teachers, has spent $2 million to create a curriculum to match the state's standards in language arts. Resource guides for other subjects are in the works. The curriculum spells out state and city academic standards and provides detailed lessons for each grade level and examples of student work that meets the standards. Observers immediately labeled the effort an attempt by the union to boost its image as a professional organization devoted to enhancing education, not just a labor group out to protect the jobs of its members. A principal complained to New York Times reporter Abby Goodnough that it should be the role of the Department of Education to set instruction, not the role of a labor union that is also in the business of protecting teachers from bad ratings. Maybe so, but it's hard to fault the union for creating a useful resource for teachers, some of whom would otherwise struggle to implement New York State's standards in the absence of any real guidance from the state department of education or school district. If the curriculum doesn't quite measure up, then someone should step forward to produce a better one. "Teachers' Union Publishes Guide for Classroom and Stirs Debate," by Abby Goodnough, The New York Times, September 13, 2002

The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to offer more special education services at public schools rather than paying to send students to more expensive private schools, but parents are fighting the change. District officials want to serve more special ed students in-house as a way to cut costs and also to comply with a federal consent decree requiring the district to accommodate more special ed students in regular classrooms instead of placing them in special schools and centers. Since superintendent Roy Romer began implementing the plan, the number of requests for special legal hearings to resolve disputes doubled to nearly 1,000 annually. Romer complains that some parents misinterpret the district's obligation under federal law to provide "a free and appropriate public education" to mean they can garner all the services they want for their children. "Parents fight changes in special ed," by David Pierson, Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2002.

By transferring funds from ineffective and low-priority labor, health and education programs, Congress could increase funding for special education by billions of dollars and thereby go a long way toward "full" federal funding of the program-which was defined as 40 percent of average per-pupil spending in the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A brief policy memo from the Heritage Foundation spells out which unproductive programs Congress should ax in order to beef up special ed, and what the resultant "savings" would be. "Making Good on Promises to Increase Funding for Special Education," by Krista Kafer, The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, September 10, 2002.

A recent study by two researchers at the University of Chicago confirmed what previous technology studies have found: simply giving schools access to the Internet does not automatically translate to gains in student achievement. Analyzing data from California, researchers found that eRate, the federal program that gives telecommunications discounts to schools and libraries (nearly $10 billion since 1999), helped connect schools to the Internet but did not affect test scores of students in those schools. Supporters of eRate respond by claiming that the program was designed to do nothing more than provide the infrastructure necessary to give students access to the Internet where they can gain skills crucial in today's workplace. "Study finds no link yet between internet access, test scores in California schools," eSchool News Online, September 12, 2002 (requires free registration).

In a piece for Tech Central Station, Joanne Jacobs recently profiled K12, former Education Secretary William Bennett's kindergarten through twelfth-grade online curriculum and "virtual school" program. Students using K12's basic package receive daily lessons in all the core subjects-an additional package includes art and music-but spend less than one-third of their time online; the remaining time is spent working the old fashioned way: with textbooks, workbooks, and numerous other materials supplied by K12. While the for-profit company is expanding in the cyber charter world (independent public schools that provide lessons over the Internet) and attracting new converts to home schooling, some traditional home schoolers are wary of what they perceive as a threat to their independence. Find out more in "Teach the Children Well," by Joanne Jacobs, Tech Central Station, September 9, 2002.

Secretary of Education Rod Paige this week announced the formation of two new offices within the Education Department, the Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Nina Shokraii Rees will leave her job as deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney to serve as deputy undersecretary in charge of the new Office of Innovation and Improvement. It will assume responsibility for federal programs related to choice, charter schools, private schools, and magnet schools, and will work with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to implement the public school choice and supplemental services provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Office of Innovation and Improvement will also house many of the department's discretionary programs, such as Transition to Teaching. The Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, to be led by former Texas appeals court judge Eric Andell, will house all programs related to safe schools, crisis and response, alcohol and drug prevention, health and well being of students, and building strong character and citizenship. Press releases ("Paige Announces Formation of Two New Offices"; "Nina Shokraii Rees to Head New Office of Innovation and Improvement"; and "Eric D. Andell to Lead New Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools") are available at http://www.ed.gov/PressReleases/index.html.

School choice may be addictive: the more of it people get, the more they seem to want. Don't be fooled by news accounts of scant demand for the public-school choice provision of NCLB. That's a consequence of too few decent options for kids combined with foot dragging by school systems. Look instead at Florida and Cleveland, where the appeal of vouchers is spreading.

Though the Sunshine State's "Opportunity Scholarship" program is presently under a judicial cloud-as Florida appeals a circuit court ruling that it violates the state constitution-it's drawing hundreds more students than last year. Recall that this program kicks in when one's public school gets an "F" from the state accountability system in two years out of four. In that way, it resembles the NCLB public-school choice provision. In Florida, however, families also have the option of attending private schools at state expense, or public schools elsewhere. As of spring '02, ten schools enrolling 9000 youngsters were on the state's exit-eligible list. By the end of August, 577 students were claiming the state's $3900 scholarships to enroll in private schools-and another 900 were moving to other public schools. Meanwhile, some 9000 disabled youngsters are also taking their "McKay Scholarships" (which range from $4500 to $21,000) to attend private schools. Though these numbers are still just a small fraction Florida's two-million-plus K-12 enrollment, they're much larger than last year's.

Up north in Cleveland, by mid-August the Ohio Department of Education had received 2,200 first-time applications for that city's voucher program, ten percent more than a year earlier. Dozens applied within days of the Supreme Court's June ruling on the program's constitutionality. "I think people were just waiting to see what would happen," remarked a spokeswoman for the Department. The state has 5,523 vouchers on offer this year, up from 4,500 last year, but no additional schools are participating so there may not be room for all the would-be enrollees in the fifty or so schools that now accept voucher bearers. (As you may recall, Cleveland vouchers are meager-about $2250-so it's not economical for private schools to participate unless they are the low-cost kind and have vacant seats. As you may also recall, suburban public schools have declined to accept voucher recipients.)

Cleveland's public school system is starting to respond to the competition in a constructive way, trying to provide better options for that city's youngsters. With help from the Gates Foundation, it is opening new "small learning environments" for ninth graders. "Freshman academies" have started in three high schools. A "SuccessTech" program is enrolling 100 ninth graders and is slated to grow to 400, while an "Early College" program of similar size has opened on the campus of Cleveland State University. "What we're trying to do," explains superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett, "is to destroy the false perception that kids in Cleveland and in inner cities can't do this kind of work." Well and good. Given Cleveland's horrific drop out rate, it's long been clear that something needs to be done for the city's high-school students. But one may be forgiven for suspecting that this school system has also recognized-along with Justice O'Connor and her colleagues-that it no longer enjoys an education monopoly and that, if it wants to keep its schools open, its staff employed and its community placated, it must begin to do things differently.

Astute superintendents across the land are figuring this out. One of the ablest, Boston's Tom Payzant, announced at his opening staff conclave that "Some of you may not like charter schools, but they're not going away. The competition is real-for the resources and for the kids. We've got to meet it by saying we can do it as well or better." Indeed, the fiscal effects of that competition are more palpable than ever, as Massachusetts governor Jane Swift recently vetoed an appropriation that would compensate school systems for the loss of pupils to charter schools-costing Boston some $11 million this year. Payzant's proposals for school improvement include more "collaborative coaching" of teachers and greater cross-fertilization between the systems' charter-like "pilot schools" and the city's regular public schools.

In Dayton, Ohio, the Midwestern epicenter of the charter earthquake (19 schools with nearly 5000 children at present), a complicated pact is in the works between the school system and the city's business leadership that, if finally implemented, will include the system's cooperation in creating a charter or charter-like high school for youngsters emerging ninth grade from the community's many K-8 charters-and the use of a school-system building for that purpose. This nascent deal has many moving parts, including business support for a November bond levy and a three-year moratorium on more business-backed K-8 charters, plus new mechanisms for assuring results-based accountability in the school system. The high school plan also hinges on amending state law to stop penalizing school systems that create "conversion charters." (Under a vexing provision of Ohio's charter statute, such schools are no longer counted in the district's enrollment for funding purposes and their students don't count in the district's scores on state proficiency tests. The former provision discourages districts from creating conversion charters while the latter functions as a disincentive in cases where youngsters attending such charters might boost the district average.) So it's far from certain that this intricate agreement will gel. But it wouldn't even be on the table except for choice-driven competition and the system's realization-like Boston's Payzant-that this isn't going away.

Occasionally, the exodus of pupils from a troubled school brings immediate benefits to the school itself. As 175 of the 735 youngsters previously enrolled in Orlando's Mollie Ray Elementary School avail themselves of Florida Opportunity Scholarships to exit that school, the community is pitching in to improve it. U.S. News reports that "Businesses called to donate computers-and the technicians to wire and repair them. A home-builders association is organizing volunteers to help tutor kids and retrofit classrooms." No slouch at turning lemons into lemonade, Principal Joy Taylor is also touting the smaller classes and more individualized instruction that result from the sudden enrollment drop as benefits for those pupils who remain.

As we rue the foot-dragging that has characterized many school systems' response to NCLB's choice provisions, it's heartening to note these non-federal examples of consumer interest in school choice-no wonder this year's Kappan/Gallup survey showed an up tick in support for vouchers-and the reminder that it need not wait for Washington to pull the trigger.

Over the last few weeks, many have set out to answer the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism.

In a recent column on Slate.com, Jonathan Zimmerman argued that the question, "What lessons should we teach?" is the wrong question because it implies that we should transmit a single viewpoint or perspective about the attacks. Those who are attempting to answer the question, Zimmerman writes, break into two predictable camps: "the flag-wavers and the self-haters." Zimmerman charges that both camps share a deeply undemocratic assumption: that kids should agree with what they are taught and with those who teach them. Instead, he suggests, students should be presented with the views of both the "flag-wavers and the self-haters" and be allowed to make up their own minds, to come to their own conclusions about September 11th.

Someone needs to say a word for teaching America's core values and for waving the flag when appropriate. Here is my explanation.

Children are not born with an innate belief in the values of a free society. They are not born believing in the importance of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the other freedoms and rights that we hold dear. They are not born believing in the right to form and organize groups independent of the government.

If they were, the world would be a freer, more democratic place than it is. But our daughters and sons do not enter the world knowing these things. They are profoundly vulnerable to what adults teach them, for good or for ill. If anything, we have ample evidence that churches, schools, the law, and the other institutions of society can be used to teach intolerance and hatred for those whose speech, religion, dress, and ideas differ from our own.

It makes no sense for parents, for society, or for schools to take a hands-off attitude towards children and assume that they will figure it all out for themselves. Some might conclude that it is OK to discriminate against people who are different; some deduce that it is OK to silence dissident voices; some might decide that it is OK to tie Matthew Shepard to a fencepost and leave him to die.

No, I think we must defend and teach the values that we believe in, not because they are ours, but because they are the values that make a free, democratic, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious society possible. Without the civil liberties and political rights that undergird democratic society, we could see those rights and liberties whittled away by forces of passion, intolerance, religious hatred, and ignorance.

Where does the flag fit into this discussion? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the flag is a symbol of our rights and freedoms. It is a symbol of the sacrifices that others have made over the years so that we might live in freedom, free to argue with each other, free to sneer at our elected officials, free to practice our religion or no religion at all.

Now comes the confession. One of my earliest family photographs shows me and a couple of my siblings in Houston, Texas, holding and waving small American flags. It was taken when I was 6 in 1944.

Why were we waving the flag? My uncle Herman was in the South Pacific, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fighting the Japanese. He saw combat in some very bloody battles; many of his friends were killed, some while detained in Japanese POW camps. We were waving it for him and other American soldiers and sailors.

Why were we waving the flag? My family is Jewish. My mother arrived in America in 1917, my father's family earlier. In 1944, my mother's remaining family in Bessarabia was being processed into incinerators, as was my father's remaining family in Poland. None survived the war. We were waving the flag for them. We were waving the flag, too, for the American G.I.'s who were fighting and dying in Europe to stop the madman who had unleashed the war. We knew that they were fighting and dying for us.

Since 1960, I have lived in New York City where, over the years, I have not seen too many flags except for the annual veterans' parades, which were sparsely attended.

All that changed last September 11.

On that infamous date, I rushed to the harbor and arrived in time to see the second plane strike the second tower. It was right in front of me. I stood there watching people burn to death, watching massive flames and smoke pouring out of the two buildings, watching the sky above me fill up with confetti, the detritus from people's desks. People whose only "crime" was to come to work in the morning.

My neighborhood in Brooklyn that day was covered by a thick layer of ash that blew across the harbor. By noon, the ash blanketed the cars on the street, the dust so thick in the air that it was like night-time-on a day that began with a brilliant blue sky. A neighbor who lived across the street from me died at the top of one of the towers; she was a vice-president of Morgan Stanley. Everyone knew someone who died, and everyone knew people who had barely survived.

Overnight the flags began to appear in my neighborhood. This is a neighborhood that typically votes 90% Democratic. People who never owned a flag suddenly had one hanging over their front door, attached to their car antenna, pinned to their chest.

Most of the flags remained in place all year. They all came back again as the one-year anniversary of the attacks approached.

Why are people wearing and displaying and "waving" the flag? They are saying, in the shortest short-hand that they know, that we treasure our nation's ideals. We are part of a national community that has struggled to achieve its rights and freedoms, and we are determined to support and defend that national community and those rights and freedoms.

Part of the ongoing struggle involves teaching our children what those rights and freedoms are, how precious they are, how easily they have been lost in the past, and how important it is to understand and defend them.

I will continue to wave the flag, because I continue to love the ideals that our country represents. If others disagree, so be it. It's a free country.

Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

* * *

On Monday, President Bush announced two new government initiatives to invigorate the teaching of American history and culture. For details see "Two for the History Books," by Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post, September 18, 2002

No longer is cheating restricted to the jocks and 'slow' kids in the back of the room. Today's cheaters are tomorrow's Harvard freshmen-overachievers with too much to do and few qualms about finding the easiest way to produce a 5-page paper on King Lear. According to a disturbing story by Brigid Schulte in The Washington Post Magazine, while the crib sheet under the baseball cap is still in fashion, today's high school cheater is likely to have found the answers to the quiz in the teacher's own test file stored on the school's server, or on the Internet, which seems to be the answer to every student procrastinator's prayer. In the sink-or-swim world of high school today, students say that what matters most is the bottom line, and "'remorse,' says one student, 'just slows you down.'" See "Cheatin', Writin' & 'Rithmetic," by Brigid Schulte, The Washington Post Magazine, September 15, 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4968-2002Sep11.html .

edited by M. Suzanne Donovan and Christopher T. Cross, National Research Council
2002

As Congress debates reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) later this year and into next, reports like "Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education" by the National Research Council will receive much attention. The main point of this hefty volume, issued by the Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, is that minority youngsters who are ill-prepared for school should first receive some quality classroom instruction and social support such as tutoring before being channeled into special education programs. IDEA should not become a perverse safety net for schools and communities that have failed to teach children basic skills. This report also reminds all who seek to shrink the achievement gap between white and minority students that the effort must start at the onset of their education, or even earlier. According to the Committee, "there is substantial evidence with regard to both behavior and achievement that early identification and intervention is more effective than later identification and intervention." Despite this fact, the report continues, "the current special education identification process relies on a 'wait-to-fail' principle that both increases the likelihood that children will fail because they do not receive early supports and decreases the effectiveness of supports once they are received." To meet the needs of at-risk children as well as those of gifted students, the Committee urges making certain that teacher licensing and certification requirements call for training in effective intervention methods to assist students who fail to meet minimum academic standards-or who exceed them. You'll find plenty to chew on in this report, available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10128.html.

Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education, California state legislature
2002

One can never be sure that an education "master plan" will amount to more than the paper it's printed on, but California is at it again. After several years of labor, a joint committee of the legislature has given birth to this 240-page behemoth, which seeks both to overhaul the state's famed (but now four-decade-old) higher-education master plan and to offer the state a 20-years-into-the-future blueprint for K-16 education. Much heavy lifting lies ahead for any of this to become real, including such controversial provisions as turning the state's elected superintendent of public instruction into a gubernatorial appointee. Two years of (voluntary) public pre-school are sought by the authors, as is mandatory kindergarten, an end to "emergency" credentials for teachers, and so forth-all totaling 56 main recommendations and countless sub-recommendations. A few flashes of boldness can be found in these pages but, for the most part, this is a mainstream, "more of the same," "do it within the existing system" document that's long on regulations and resources and exceptionally thin on unconventional ways of doing things. You'll find little here that smacks of results-based accountability, for example, and virtually nothing that calls for choice, competition or the entry of teachers and principals via unconventional routes. You can download the report from www.sen.ca.gov/masterplan/.

National Center for Education Statistics
August 2002

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) used its "fast response survey system" to develop this report on alternative schools and kindred programs operating within public school systems. These turn out to be fairly widespread-almost 11,000 such schools and programs running in 39 percent of school systems and serving some 613,000 youngsters, mostly at the secondary level. You can learn a lot about these exceptionally varied programs from this report, including their entrance and exit criteria, the nature of their offerings, staffing and arrangements with other agencies. You cannot, however, learn some things you might find most interesting, such as how they are administered and how many are outsourced to private operators. You'll find a PDF copy at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002004.pdf.

Noel White, Cathy Ringstaff and Loretta Kelley, WestEd
2002

WestEd has produced a short report reviewing extant research on the relationship between technology and learning. Because it is difficult to control for all the variables that affect learning, such research is basically inconclusive, but WestEd sought to identify the conditions under which technology seems to bring the greatest returns for students. They describe ten such conditions, ranging from the predictable (provide adequate, appropriate professional development and equipment; integrate technology within the curricular framework) to the slightly more noteworthy (change teacher beliefs about learning and teaching; include technology as "one piece of the puzzle"-the other pieces being accompanying reforms at the classroom, school and district levels). As the authors acknowledge, "perhaps not surprisingly, these conditions for enhancing the value of technology investments are essentially the conditions for improving student learning in general." You'll find a PDF edition of this report at http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/kn-02-01.pdf. The longer literature review on which this report is based can be found at http://www.WestEd.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619.

Public Agenda
September 2002

In collaboration with the National Constitution Center, Public Agenda has released this interesting and, for the most part, reassuring study of Americans' attitudes toward their Constitution and the principles enshrined therein. Based on a summer '02 survey of 1500 adults, this 66-page report confirms that Americans have deep respect for their Constitution and the governmental system it ordained, even if they don't regard themselves as very knowledgeable about it. Few find America perfect-and people want their children to be taught history "warts and all"-but the nation's failings are generally seen as incomplete fulfillment of its principles and aspirations rather than something basically awry in those principles. The survey shows post-9/11 Americans generally willing to empower government to root out threats to the national security, but it also reveals the expected divisions over specific policy issues such as abortion. You can find it on-line at http://www.publicagenda.org/specials/constitution/constitution.htm.

Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services
September 2002

The Gadfly has previously grumped that Standard & Poor's much-discussed School Evaluation Services (SES) left something to be desired. (See, for example, Ray Domanico's guest editorial from November 2001 at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=82#1249.) The biggest problem then was that the data SES provided to its two main client states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, were all district wide, not school-specific. Our spirits lifted when SES issued terrific school-level reports on charter schools sponsored by Central Michigan University. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=50#1377.) Now we're even cheerier, for the latest evolution of SES analytic offerings is getting really useful. New district-level AND school-level reports for Michigan are accompanied by flexible analytic tools that can be accessed by policymakers, educators, analysts, and parents alike. You'll find a general description of these new offerings at
http://ses.standardandpoors.com/ and a revealing new analysis of Michigan school districts at http://ses.standardandpoors.com/pdf/mi_findings.pdf ("Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends"). Particularly tantalizing is S&P's newly developed "performance cost index," a way of comparing the dollar cost of attaining various education results, such as high-school graduation or passing levels on the Michigan assessment. Also available in this report is a discussion of Michigan districts that "achieve more with less", i.e. that get extra educational bang for the buck. Better still, if you poke into the Michigan portion of the SES website, you can now get down to the building level for every public school in the state and there you can learn a lot about their performance on state tests, that performance disaggregated by student group (as NCLB requires), staffing ratios and more, including comparisons of individual schools to their counties and the state. It's still not perfect; for example, cost data are not available at the building level, there's no simplified "school report card" for parents, and some other things one might want to know about a school (such as its teachers' qualifications) are not there yet, either. Nor does it track performance against specific academic standards or give teachers (and parents) feedback on their own students. (Other excellent systems do, such as Project Achieve, which you can find at www.projectachieve.com, and Schoolnet, at www.schoolnet.com.) But S&P's SES is emerging as a terrific building-and-district-level information system and the only one we've seen that seeks to link school-system performance to the cost of producing it.

The Century Foundation
September 2002

If school choice were ice cream, this new 250-page report from the Century Foundation might be compared with slightly sour skim milk. It's a commission product, issued by a panel chaired by former U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, a group that seems to have exhumed the worst social engineering ideas of the past four decades while dumping all over real school choice. We'll have more to say about it in an upcoming Gadfly. If you can't wait for the fuller review, surf to http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Detail.asp?ItemID=168.