The Education Gadfly Weekly

David N. Plank and Gary Sykes, editors, Teachers College Press
April 2003

This book attempts to shed some light on school choice in America through nine chapters that examine the education systems of a range of countries, each with a form of choice. It describes Chile's national voucher plan, Australia's state-funded private schools, and New Zealand's public school choice system, as well as examples from England, Sweden, South Africa, China, and Central Europe. Each country has a unique and interesting story to tell, but, not surprisingly, none offers a magic prescription for the United States. Every land still has problems to solve and, as is commonly the case, it is difficult to determine whether the successes and failures in each are attributable to choice or to other factors at work. Still, the pitfalls illustrated in the book are certainly worth understanding so that these same mistakes can be avoided in the U.S. The preface also provides interesting ideological, economic, political and social explanations for the ubiquity of the trend toward increased school choice. Unfortunately, this wisdom will cost you $45; to buy a copy, visit http://store.tcpress.com/0807742910.shtml.

Paul Gagnon, Albert Shanker Institute
2003

Historian Paul Gagnon, now senior research associate at Boston University's Center for School Improvement, authored this 200-page report for the Albert Shanker Institute. Essentially, it's a critical review of states' social studies standards to determine whether and how well they promote the teaching and learning of a "civic core," i.e. concepts, knowledge and skills that foster successful citizenship. The backdrop is a 1987 statement called "Education for Democracy" that was jointly produced by the American Federation of Teachers (with which the Shanker Institute is affiliated), Freedom House, and the Educational Excellence Network (founded by Diane Ravitch and myself and now subsumed within the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation). Though that "civic core" is never crisply defined in this volume, Gagnon eventually sets forth five criteria by which he evaluated the states' standards. These include such desiderata as whether "the vital insights, ideas and topics of civics, economics and geography [are] presented, whenever appropriate, in the context of the historical narrative of people in real times and places" and whether "the standards contain the topics essential to a common core of learning for the political education of citizens." He then evaluates the states' standards documents against the five criteria. Bottom line: no state's standards "largely meet" all five criteria and only one (Alabama) attains that status on four. Several more states (California, Indiana, New York) "largely" meet three criteria and "partially meet" a fourth. And so on. Among the most interesting parts of this complex and hard-to-summarize study are 40 pages of state responses that range from defensive to apologetic to peculiar. It's too bad this large amount of erudite and well-founded analysis is so hard to get one's mind around at the national level, but one supposes that individual states will find their "report cards" informative (if rarely welcome), and we're all better off knowing that one reason young Americans aren't learning a heckuva lot about history and civics is that most of them reside in states that don't even expect it. At least part of the report will be available soon on the Shanker Institute website at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/. For hard copies you will need to contact the institute directly at: The Albert Shanker Institute, 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001, Phone: 202-879-4401.

The American Institutes for Research and SRI International
April 2003

This report by The American Institutes for Research and SRI International is one in a series to be produced over the next 5-years that examines whether schools supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's National School District and Network Grants Program adopt elements of effective schooling and show better outcomes for students. It focuses on the experiences of educators and students in the first year of operation of new small schools, which mostly consisted of planning and start-up phases. Later reports will document the initiative as it is actually implemented. To nobody's surprise, the analysts find that creating successful new, small learning communities is hard but that the benefits may be promising. To view an executive summary, go to http://www.gatesfoundation.org. For the full study, go to http://www.gatesfoundation.org.

RAND Mathematics Study Panel
2003

RAND's math study panel prepared this report for the federal Office of Educational Research and Improvement (now Institute for Education Sciences). In six chapters and 80 pages, it seeks to frame a wide-ranging, long-term math-education research agenda for Uncle Sam and other funders of such research. It claims to be "rooted in practice," to bridge (or circumvent) ideological debates about math education, and to be designed "to create basic knowledge about the learning of mathematics through multiple forms of empirical inquiry." The three domains proposed for immediate attention are developing teachers' knowledge of math, teaching algebra from kindergarten through high school, and teaching and learning "mathematical practices." The report goes on to frame an elaborate set of arrangements for a "partnership between government and the mathematics education research community." Though the panel that wrote it contains a bunch of eminent math educators (and some mathematicians) and though it claims to value "computation skills," those looking for a research agenda that will help ensure that young Americans really do learn their multiplication tables will not find much comfort here. For the most part, we're looking at a sophisticated research agenda based on NCTM assumptions about math education. The ISBN is 083303331X and you can see it online (or order a copy) by surfing to http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1643/.

David T. Conley, Standards for Success
2003

The Association of American Universities and the Pew Charitable Trusts have a project called "Standards for Success" that is trying to spell out the skills and knowledge that high school graduates need to possess in order to have a reasonably good chance of succeeding in college-level academic work. This 80-page report endeavors to spell out standards of achievement that high school seniors ought to attain in six core academic areas: the big four (English, math, science, social science) plus the arts and foreign languages. It's clear, ambitious and mostly sensible, yet one must wonder if it's pie in the sky - even as the authors dispatch copies to every high school in the land. The central problem is that it's purely hortatory. It's hard to picture any of the sponsoring universities actually turning down applicants on grounds that they don't know or cannot do some of these things. (It's also hard to know how they would determine this, as college entrance tests are nowhere near this specific or revealing, nor are high school course syllabi, grading standards and transcripts.) Bottom line: it'd be fantastic if U.S. high school produced such graduates, but if all the universities are prepared to do is recommend it, the requisite changes in institutional and individual behavior at the K-12 level are not likely to occur. You can find it for yourself at http://www.s4s.org/03_viewproducts/ksus/index.php. Note, too, that the ongoing American Diploma Project is making solid progress in developing a set of recommended high school exit standards (in English and math only) that are the joint product of college faculty AND employers, the point being that a state's high-school exit test (if any) is not legitimately applied only to those young people headed straight for academic higher education. For more information on the American Diploma Project's work, go to http://www.achieve.org/achieve.nsf/DiplomaProject?openform.

In January, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty announced his plan to kill the five year old "Profile of Learning" standards, which focus on measuring "higher-order thinking" based on projects and reports instead of traditional pencil and paper tests, and replace them with new, more rigorous content-based academic standards. [For more information, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=8#370.] That set the stage for a considerable tussle about what the new standards should look like - a struggle that's exacerbated by the legislature's insistence on enacting the standards into law. To date, the Minnesota House has approved a new set of standards created by Pawlenty's education commission and spearheaded by his outstanding education commissioner, Cheri Yecke. Last week, however, the state Senate passed a different plan with standards that ostensibly improve upon, rather than replace the "Profile of Learning." The two sides now have two weeks to hash out their differences in a conference committee before the legislative session ends.

"Profile of learning: Senate passes new academic standards," by John Welsh, Pioneer Press, May 3, 2003

Last week, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams shocked both voucher friends and foes when he came out publicly in support of an experimental D.C. voucher program. In February, when the White House released its 2004 budget proposal, which included funding for the D.C. voucher program, Mayor Williams, along with D.C. school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz and D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, criticized the Bush administration for attempting to impose vouchers on the District. [For more details about the Administration's proposal, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#351.] Now he joins Ms. Cooper Cafritz as the second D.C. official to reverse that stance. This leaves Holmes-Norton alone in the unenviable position of defending the D.C. school system status quo and rejecting this chance to improve the educational opportunities for children living in the nation's capital.

"Williams endorses vouchers for schools," by Mary Shaffrey, The Washington Times, May 2, 2003

"A Mayor Breakthrough," editorial, The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2003 (registration required)

"Mayor endorses vouchers in D.C.," by Craig Timberg and Justin Blum, The Washington Post, May 2, 2003

The Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek seeks a silver lining to California's budgetary clouds. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he contends that this could be the time to free California from the costly "straitjacket" of class-size reduction and thereby free some resources for more effective achievement-boosting strategies. Hanushek explains, for example, that "the difference in benefits gained from a good teacher (even in a large class) and a mediocre one (even in a small class) is far larger than any difference produced by class size." He believes that California would be smart to use its available education resources on such high-yield strategies as attracting better teachers, rather than placing fewer kids in every classroom.

"End the class-size straitjacket," by Eric Hanushek, The Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2003

On Tuesday, the Princeton Review released its second annual ranking of the states' testing and accountability systems - rendered all the more timely by the requirements of NCLB. The rankings were based on four criteria: 1) whether the state's test is well-aligned to its curriculum standards, 2) the quality of the test, 3) the degree of openness of state testing policies and procedures to ongoing improvement, and 4) the ability of the tests to influence education policy in a way that is consistent with the goals of the state. The study seeks to highlight the difference between those accountability programs that are done well, such as New York, Massachusetts and Texas, and those that are done poorly, including Montana, Rhode Island and South Dakota, "to insist that those who design accountability systems be held accountable for their impact on the next several generations of students."

"Testing the testers," The Princeton Review, May 2003

Readers of these columns know that I've been a wee bit ambivalent about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. So when I was asked to discuss it at the recent educator awards ceremony of the Milken Family Foundation, the likeliest - and most boring - approach was to give an equivocal speech, full of buts, howevers and maybes. Yawn. Instead, we decided that I would debate myself, taking up a series of NCLB-related issues and doing my best to argue in favor of and then against each. There turned out to be ten issues. What follows is an abbreviated version of my "debate" about five of these. The other five will follow soon.

The federal role in education

Washington is right to intrude itself in this major way into American public education so long as the end is worthy and the means effective. Nor is there anything new about Uncle Sam advancing national education objectives by using money and regulations to alter the practices and priorities of states, schools and educators. In this instance, the problem's diagnosis goes back at least 20 years to A Nation at Risk, which said the country had a grave problem posed by the weak academic performance of its schools and students. Efforts to solve that problem have been pursued by Washington ever since, in a pattern that runs from Charlottesville in 1989 through Bush I's "America 2000" program to Clinton's "Goals 2000" to NCLB. A serious national problem begs for a national solution and where else could that come from if not Washington?

Nowhere in the federal Constitution does the word "education" appear. Rather, every state has written into its own constitution the self-imposed obligation to educate its citizens. It's wrong for Washington to push them around in the ways we find in No Child Left Behind. Moreover, states are not all alike. Some people in Washington may think everyplace should resemble Texas but, in fact, Oregon and Vermont and Maryland have very different notions about education, about what good standards look like, what assessments to use, what kind of accountability system will work best and who should be accountable for what. They also have very different approaches to training, evaluating and certifying teachers. For Uncle Sam to crack down on this kind of diversity is wrong in principle and dysfunctional in practice.

State Standards, National Timetable

NCLB's authors were smart to direct states to set their own standards while giving them all the same twelve-year timeline for getting children up to "proficiency." While a case can be made for national academic standards, America doesn't have the political stomach for that today. Besides, the states were already beavering away at it. (Iowa may be the only place that hasn't even tried.) It would be disruptive to override these evolving state standards. Moreover, states will be the main enforcers and should therefore be the standard-setters.

But if we left it to 50 states to pick their own timetables for getting all children to the proficient level, endless delay would follow. Morally and pragmatically, everyone needs a deadline. Twelve years is a reasonable period. Besides, there will be plenty of sunshine on these results, and ample opportunities to compare them, since every state must now take part in the National Assessment. Nobody can long hide.

Talk about the worst of both worlds. Talk about perverse incentives. Letting standards vary while holding the schedule constant is an invitation to lower standards. Think how much easier it will be to boost all students to the proficient level in twelve years if proficiency is dumbed down to what was previously deemed "basic" or "partly proficient." Why encourage states to set easy standards so as to comply with an arbitrary deadline? Moreover, the timeline seems to allow for some finagling, as states defer the bulk of their achievement gains into the last few years of the 12-year period. This is really cynical and violates the spirit of NCLB, leaving the heavy lifting and potential embarrassment to one's successors.

Every Child?

Insisting that every single girl and boy become academically proficient is true to American values and the only goal worth having. Yes, it's ambitious, but imagine Kennedy saying we would get 90% of the way to the moon. Besides, if we start winking when some kids get left behind, or giving waivers to schools and states that don't quite get to where they should, guess who will populate the waiver lists? Poor and minority kids, kids in troubled schools, those with disabilities: the very children who have gotten the short end of the stick forever. No, the only way to be serious about leaving no children behind, and the only formula that is morally defensible and politically palatable in the American democracy, is to insist that we mean every single kid. No exceptions.

It sounds noble but it's pie in the sky. Everybody who has spent time working with children knows that they're as different as snowflakes. Some are quick, some slow, some eager, others apathetic. Some come from supportive homes, others have no homes at all. What's more, families are so mobile that half the faces in some classrooms are different in June than in September. How on earth can schools be held accountable for all their results?

Every Year?

Holding schools responsible for "adequate yearly progress" - and making this transparent - is the only way to keep all schools accountable for their students. It's the fairest, surest way of tracking which schools are and aren't succeeding and, by disaggregating the results, it'll be clear whether this is working for boys as well as girls, for minority kids, for disabled youngsters, and so forth. Yes, the AYP calculation is complicated but we'll get used to it. After all, corporations are audited annually; the auditors poke into everything, all the assets and liabilities, not just the bottom line profit summary, and they make their findings available to shareholders and government regulators. We should get accustomed to thinking of schools this way.

Schools are full of living, breathing human beings, some of whom aren't the same from one year to the next. Some kids are more fortunate than others. Some teachers are more effective. This endless micro-analyzing of test scores and insistence on fitting every group of children into a fixed set of annual academic gains - well, it's reminiscent of that mythological fellow Procrustes, who insisted that everyone had to fit precisely into his bed; if you were too tall he sliced you down; if you were too short he had you stretched. What's more, tens of thousands of schools are apt to turn up on the hit list now and then, for any of a dozen reasons, including random test-score fluctuations. What good will it do a school system or state if two thirds of its schools wind up on the "needs improvement" list? And what happens if half of THOSE schools weren't on the list the previous year even as others drop off that list the following year? This AYP system is great for psychometricians and statisticians but it's a joke for teachers and kids.

Why So Much Testing?

Annual testing in the core subjects is the only way to know whether progress is being made. When you skip years or grades, you lose track of whether Jamie and Amy are making the gains they should. Though some educators resist pushing kids into grades instead of letting them progress at their own speeds in different subjects, parents and policy makers can only know whether children are making satisfactory progress when gauged in relation to their grades in school, and can only know whether the Franklin School's 4th graders are learning what they should if they can see how those kids were doing at the end of 3rd.

Yes, people fuss about testing burden and teaching to the test, but if the tests are properly aligned with curricular goals and state standards, then teaching kids what they must know to pass is an honorable thing to do.

We're becoming slaves to tests, which all too often are NOT aligned with standards but are simply what the low-bidding testing company was willing to provide. There are a million things worth teaching that don't lend themselves to multiple-choice testing, and the surest way to kill a school's distinctiveness or an educator's enthusiasm is to homogenize everything into a test centered, drill and kill system.

As for using annual test scores to determine Jamie's and Amy's fate, only someone imbibing the waters of the Potomac would think that kids can be standardized like widgets. They really do learn at different speeds and some really do test better than others. To hinge everything on a single annual test score is to defy human nature and cognitive psychology, to cause needless stress for all concerned, and to risk a lot of false positives and negatives depending on what day of the week it is, whether Jamie got a decent night's sleep and whether Amy is distracted by a dog barking outside the room where she's taking that silly test.

In his New York Times column this week, the curmudgeonly Michael Winerip attempts to discredit the voucher movement by questioning Harvard scholar Paul Peterson's findings from a 2000 study of a New York City voucher experiment - a study that, according to Peterson's team, showed vouchers significantly improving achievement for black students. In support of his case, Winerip cites the results from a reanalysis of the same data by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Pei Zhu [for the Gadfly's review of this study, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=18#215]. The latter employed different statistical methods and a different operational definition of "black" and found that the achievement gains dissipated. The jury remains out. America has not yet had the kind of voucher experiment it needs. And the opponents of vouchers, now undoubtedly scrambling to cite Winerip in support of their case, are determined that no such experiment ever takes place.

"What some much-noted data really showed about vouchers," by Michael Winerip, The New York Times, May 7, 2003

David N. Plank and Gary Sykes, editors, Teachers College Press
April 2003

This book attempts to shed some light on school choice in America through nine chapters that examine the education systems of a range of countries, each with a form of choice. It describes Chile's national voucher plan, Australia's state-funded private schools, and New Zealand's public school choice system, as well as examples from England, Sweden, South Africa, China, and Central Europe. Each country has a unique and interesting story to tell, but, not surprisingly, none offers a magic prescription for the United States. Every land still has problems to solve and, as is commonly the case, it is difficult to determine whether the successes and failures in each are attributable to choice or to other factors at work. Still, the pitfalls illustrated in the book are certainly worth understanding so that these same mistakes can be avoided in the U.S. The preface also provides interesting ideological, economic, political and social explanations for the ubiquity of the trend toward increased school choice. Unfortunately, this wisdom will cost you $45; to buy a copy, visit http://store.tcpress.com/0807742910.shtml.

David T. Conley, Standards for Success
2003

The Association of American Universities and the Pew Charitable Trusts have a project called "Standards for Success" that is trying to spell out the skills and knowledge that high school graduates need to possess in order to have a reasonably good chance of succeeding in college-level academic work. This 80-page report endeavors to spell out standards of achievement that high school seniors ought to attain in six core academic areas: the big four (English, math, science, social science) plus the arts and foreign languages. It's clear, ambitious and mostly sensible, yet one must wonder if it's pie in the sky - even as the authors dispatch copies to every high school in the land. The central problem is that it's purely hortatory. It's hard to picture any of the sponsoring universities actually turning down applicants on grounds that they don't know or cannot do some of these things. (It's also hard to know how they would determine this, as college entrance tests are nowhere near this specific or revealing, nor are high school course syllabi, grading standards and transcripts.) Bottom line: it'd be fantastic if U.S. high school produced such graduates, but if all the universities are prepared to do is recommend it, the requisite changes in institutional and individual behavior at the K-12 level are not likely to occur. You can find it for yourself at http://www.s4s.org/03_viewproducts/ksus/index.php. Note, too, that the ongoing American Diploma Project is making solid progress in developing a set of recommended high school exit standards (in English and math only) that are the joint product of college faculty AND employers, the point being that a state's high-school exit test (if any) is not legitimately applied only to those young people headed straight for academic higher education. For more information on the American Diploma Project's work, go to http://www.achieve.org/achieve.nsf/DiplomaProject?openform.

Paul Gagnon, Albert Shanker Institute
2003

Historian Paul Gagnon, now senior research associate at Boston University's Center for School Improvement, authored this 200-page report for the Albert Shanker Institute. Essentially, it's a critical review of states' social studies standards to determine whether and how well they promote the teaching and learning of a "civic core," i.e. concepts, knowledge and skills that foster successful citizenship. The backdrop is a 1987 statement called "Education for Democracy" that was jointly produced by the American Federation of Teachers (with which the Shanker Institute is affiliated), Freedom House, and the Educational Excellence Network (founded by Diane Ravitch and myself and now subsumed within the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation). Though that "civic core" is never crisply defined in this volume, Gagnon eventually sets forth five criteria by which he evaluated the states' standards. These include such desiderata as whether "the vital insights, ideas and topics of civics, economics and geography [are] presented, whenever appropriate, in the context of the historical narrative of people in real times and places" and whether "the standards contain the topics essential to a common core of learning for the political education of citizens." He then evaluates the states' standards documents against the five criteria. Bottom line: no state's standards "largely meet" all five criteria and only one (Alabama) attains that status on four. Several more states (California, Indiana, New York) "largely" meet three criteria and "partially meet" a fourth. And so on. Among the most interesting parts of this complex and hard-to-summarize study are 40 pages of state responses that range from defensive to apologetic to peculiar. It's too bad this large amount of erudite and well-founded analysis is so hard to get one's mind around at the national level, but one supposes that individual states will find their "report cards" informative (if rarely welcome), and we're all better off knowing that one reason young Americans aren't learning a heckuva lot about history and civics is that most of them reside in states that don't even expect it. At least part of the report will be available soon on the Shanker Institute website at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/. For hard copies you will need to contact the institute directly at: The Albert Shanker Institute, 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001, Phone: 202-879-4401.

RAND Mathematics Study Panel
2003

RAND's math study panel prepared this report for the federal Office of Educational Research and Improvement (now Institute for Education Sciences). In six chapters and 80 pages, it seeks to frame a wide-ranging, long-term math-education research agenda for Uncle Sam and other funders of such research. It claims to be "rooted in practice," to bridge (or circumvent) ideological debates about math education, and to be designed "to create basic knowledge about the learning of mathematics through multiple forms of empirical inquiry." The three domains proposed for immediate attention are developing teachers' knowledge of math, teaching algebra from kindergarten through high school, and teaching and learning "mathematical practices." The report goes on to frame an elaborate set of arrangements for a "partnership between government and the mathematics education research community." Though the panel that wrote it contains a bunch of eminent math educators (and some mathematicians) and though it claims to value "computation skills," those looking for a research agenda that will help ensure that young Americans really do learn their multiplication tables will not find much comfort here. For the most part, we're looking at a sophisticated research agenda based on NCTM assumptions about math education. The ISBN is 083303331X and you can see it online (or order a copy) by surfing to http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1643/.

The American Institutes for Research and SRI International
April 2003

This report by The American Institutes for Research and SRI International is one in a series to be produced over the next 5-years that examines whether schools supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's National School District and Network Grants Program adopt elements of effective schooling and show better outcomes for students. It focuses on the experiences of educators and students in the first year of operation of new small schools, which mostly consisted of planning and start-up phases. Later reports will document the initiative as it is actually implemented. To nobody's surprise, the analysts find that creating successful new, small learning communities is hard but that the benefits may be promising. To view an executive summary, go to http://www.gatesfoundation.org. For the full study, go to http://www.gatesfoundation.org.