The Education Gadfly Weekly

George C. Leaf and Roxana Burris, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
October 2002

George C. Leaf and Roxana Burris wrote this 55-page report for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It does a good job of setting forth key failings of the current system of institutional accreditation. (One may worry, though, about its historical accuracy. It refers twice to a 1952 "higher education act" that I don't believe existed.) A number of its recommendations are sound. One big one, however, is at best na??ve: the suggestion that Washington stop requiring accreditation as a precondition for eligibility for federal student aid dollars and instead trust the market, assuming that students won't enroll in bad schools. Would that it were so. All sorts of private and peer rating services (such as the famous U.S. News guides) help, but people are still easily duped by false claims made by colleges and their "proprietary" counterparts. At least until Americans have decent comparative information as to the academic value added by individual institutions - which would require a sophisticated testing and/or tracking system that the higher education "community" staunchly opposes - I don't see that the consumer marketplace is an adequate replacement for accreditation, despite the latter system's myriad flaws. Have a look at http://www.goacta.org/Reports/accrediting.pdf.

Jolley Bruce Christman and Amy Rhodes, Consortium for Policy Research in Education and Research for Action
June 2002

We join in mourning the recent death of Ambassador Walter Annenberg, whose belief in public education led him to make extraordinarily generous gifts to organizations and communities that thought they knew how to reform it. Even as he is laid to rest, some of those groups persist in trying to prove that they accomplished more than they did or to rationalize their failure. Nowhere has that endeavor been more dogged than in Annenberg's own Philadelphia, where the effort to evaluate and justify the city's "Children Achieving" program continues unabated at the hands of the Penn-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education and an outfit called Research for Action. This latest report was written by Jolley Bruce Christman and Amy Rhodes, both affiliated with the latter organization. It seeks to appraise the "civic infrastructure" undergirding the city's Annenberg program (which was also former superintendent David Hornbeck's signature reform program) and, as I read it, to lay upon Philadelphia's civic leaders (business, academic, philanthropic, grassroots, etc.) a sizable share of the blame for the demise of Children Achieving and the school system's subsequent takeover by the state. Perhaps most interesting here - reminiscent of Moynihan's "Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding," the seminal analysis of the War on Poverty's community action program - is the authors' exegesis of how various factions within Philadelphia's civic leadership held differing "theories of action" as to the essential nature of the problems facing the school system and the strategies for solving them. In other words, different groups looked at the same school system and saw different ailments and cures, yet each thought it spotted its own within the Children Achieving program. The result was cacophony and fragmentation, no real shared understanding of the nature or mission of the program. Hence, according to these diagnosticians, not a lot of consensus, not a lot of achievement gain, no big infusion of state money and, in the end, the city's cession to the state of control over its school system. An interesting tale, moderately well told and with possible lessons for others involved in comprehensive urban school reform efforts. If only the authors didn't work quite to hard to shift responsibility for what happened away from the architects of the plan itself. FYI, and perhaps self-servingly, among the other evaluations of the Philadelphia Annenberg program - though not mentioned in this report - is a perceptive and critical review a couple of years back by Carol Innerst on behalf of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. You can find it at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=41. You can find the new report at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/children07.pdf.

Dana Foundation
2002

If you care about educating children in the arts, you may benefit from this 157-page handbook published by the Dana Foundation and based on a symposium that Dana sponsored a year ago. It contains thousands of tips, conceptual and practical advice for anyone interested in creating an "arts-centered" school, charter or otherwise, and fascinating glimpses of a number of such schools that are operating today. It defines the arts broadly, its examples range widely and its essays span a wide array of school issues and perspectives. Surf to http://www.dana.org/books/press/artshandbook/artsbook.pdf.

edited by Daniel J. Losen and Gary Orfield
2002

As the debate heats up over the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the issue of black children being overindentified as "children with special needs" is receiving increased attention. According to Losen and Orfield, "black students are nearly three times as likely as white students to be labeled mentally retarded." It is widely known that public schools place a disproportionate number of minority students into special education programs and classes, and for far too many of these youngsters, special ed turns out to be a treadmill from which it is almost impossible to disembark. The system helps to block these children from the mainstream of American society. What to do? The authors of this book (from Harvard's Civil Rights Project) offer a number of solutions, some a lot more appealing than others:

• Improving the quality of education children receive in the earliest grades so they are not burdened with deficits that lead to the "special ed" label in the first place.
  
• Supporting the No Child Left Behind Act's demand to end the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by insisting that all children achieve to a high standard.
  
• Using the courts to ensure that children are educated in the least restrictive environment as required by law.
  
• Strengthening Washington's hand in enforcing IDEA and monitoring state compliance.
  
• A moratorium on the use of high stakes tests for determining who receives a high school diploma and advances to the next grade until all children are provided with adequate opportunities to master the curriculum.
  
• Boosting special education funding by $2.5 billion each year until 2007, at which time Congress will meet its 40 percent commitment.

And on and on. This book lays out an agenda for special education reform from the perspective of those wanting to use schools to social engineer their vision of racial equality. To achieve this goal, they believe a big, intrusive government is a reasonable price to pay. To check out the press release for the book and learn how to obtain it, go to http://www.law.harvard.edu/civilrights/press_releases/special_ed.html.

Mike Antonucci
October 2002

Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency has produced a short but fact-filled report on the political expenditures of the teacher unions, compiled from innumerable sources. It's really only the tip of an immense iceberg. It does not, for example, include spending for lobbying by union employees and members, nor can it quantify the costs of "issue ads" or internal political communications between union leadership and the rank-and-file. And it doesn't have as many subtotals and totals as one would wish. Still, it's the most informative report of its kind we've ever seen, especially with regard to election year spending by political action committees (PACs) allied with the national unions and their state affiliates. And it's especially timely as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law goes into effect, a law that will, for example, force the unions to redirect some $3 million of PAC money that they've been accustomed to giving directly to the national political parties (mainly the Democrats). You can download this report from http://home.earthlink.net/~mantonucci/voice/voice.pdf.

U.S. Department of Commerce
September 2002

This peculiar report, which exists only in cyberspace, is a compilation of fourteen loosely linked essays that purport to present "visions" of education in a high tech future. Published by the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, it has neither introduction (save for twin letters from Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Education Secretary Rod Paige) nor any conclusions. It doesn't even have consecutive page numbering. Several of the "visions" are pretty interesting, however, as they explore the role of teachers in a technology rich education system and caution against the things that can go wrong if we go overboard in this direction. Authors range from visionary techies to the executive director of the NEA. Have a look if you crave help in picturing the possible impact of technology on education at various levels. You can find it on the web at http://www.ta.doc.gov/reports/TechPolicy/2020Visions.pdf.

Effectively reversing its 1969 decision to grant control over elementary and middle schools to local school boards, the New York legislature earlier this year gave Mayor Michael Bloomberg control of those schools by granting him power over a citywide Board of Education. New York Times Magazine contributor James Traub describes the mostly ill effects of the twenty-two intervening years of "decentralization," or local control, on Brooklyn's Junior High School 271, now I.S. 271. Initially demanded by black community activists who wanted to take control of their neighborhood schools away from white bureaucrats, local control engendered a system better known for patronage and corruption than sound educational ideas or even giving parents a voice. "A Lesson in Unintended Consequences," by James Traub, The New York Times Magazine, October 6, 2002

While the Manhattan Institute survey described above presents discouraging evidence that many teachers have not bought into standards-based reform, there are some points of light out there. In Illinois, two elementary schools are testing new report cards that replace A's, B's, and C's with indications of whether the student exceeds, meets, or has not met certain state academic standards. Parents seem to support the new report cards, which will let them know where their children need to improve. "Schools take new approach to grades," by Mary Alice Benoit, Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2002

The strongest argument for vouchers is moral, Jonathan Rauch writes in the October Atlantic Monthly. It's wrong for rich, white liberals to insist that poor children attend dysfunctional schools that they'd never allow their own children to set foot in. The next best argument is pragmatic, says Rauch: competition would improve the performance of public schools, though the author notes that there's not yet enough evidence to settle this point. However, a new study suggests that vouchers might have an unanticipated benefit: they might have a strong revitalizing effect on poor neighborhoods. Citing the work of Duke economist Thomas Nechyba, Rauch explains that parents who are currently stretching themselves to afford more expensive houses in better school districts would, if vouchers were made available, choose to live in cheaper housing and use vouchers to send their children to private schools. For more see "Reversing White Flight," by Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2002. (For our earlier review of Nechyba's report, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=49#743.)

To hardly anyone's surprise, the Houston Independent School District won the first $500,000 Broad Prize for Urban Education. Funded by Los Angeles billionaire education reformer Eli Broad, the prize recognized Houston for improving student achievement and narrowing its achievement gaps, gains achieved largely through the leadership of then-superintendent Rod Paige. The money will be distributed to graduates of the class of 2003 in the form of scholarships based on scholastic achievement and financial need. "Houston hailed as nation's best urban school district," by Joshua Benton, The Dallas Morning News, October 3, 2002

States with high academic standards have protested that the No Child Left Behind Act punishes them for setting high expectations for their students. But NCLB is not the only program that allows standards to vary for students in different states. A report by an educational consultant in the DC area complains that National Merit semifinalist awards are conferred upon a set percentage of students in each state, which means that students in Mississippi need only score 200 on the PSAT exam to qualify for the awards, while students in Virginia must score 218, students in Maryland must score 220, and students in Washington, DC must score 221. For details see "National Merit Scale Hurts Area, Study Finds," by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, October 2, 2002

In the most elaborate cheating scandal in the history of Chicago's public schools, teachers were caught giving tips, erasing incorrect answers, pointing to correct answers, and filling in the answers to questions left blank on students' Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, which were administered in May to students in grades 3 through 8. The teachers - who face possible dismissal - were nabbed with the help of a method for detecting unusual answer patterns developed by a University of Chicago economics professor. See "Teachers face firing in cheating scandal," by Rosalind Rossi and Annie Sweeney, Chicago Sun Times, October 2, 2002

Standards-based reform has become America's main strategy for boosting student achievement, strengthening school effectiveness and renewing our education system. It undergirds President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" Act as well as the reform efforts of nearly every state and community.

As everybody knows, standards-based reform rests on a tripod of academic standards, testing and accountability. It is an elaborate behaviorist scheme for altering the actions and priorities of students and educators in order that children end up learning more and schools end up producing stronger results.

But standards-based reform works only upon the outside of education's "black box," not on what happens inside the classroom. Its eventual success, therefore, is determined not by lawmakers but by teachers and pupils whose everyday decisions and priorities actually shape what is taught and learned. Once that classroom door is shut, the teacher is in charge. What she deems important, what she cares about, how she spends her time - all these have immense impact on what her students end up learning.

One way to find out what teachers judge to be important is to ask them. Though plenty of surveys have been conducted over the years, few have probed teachers' views of key elements of standards-based education reform. So the Manhattan Institute, with the help of the University of Connecticut's highly regarded survey research center, decided to investigate. Its report came out last week. ("What Do Teachers Teach? A Survey of America's Fourth and Eighth Grade Teachers," Christopher Barnes, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute, September 2002)

Working with a national sample of 4th and 8th grade classroom teachers, it inquired into their educational philosophies and instructional methods, their view of standards and their curricular priorities. The results are revealing and more than a little alarming. Five findings display a chasm between teachers' views and reformers' expectations.

First, a majority of teachers in both 4th and 8th grade opt for "student-directed learning" rather than "teacher-directed learning." No more than two in five affirm a philosophy of education in which the adult in the classroom sets the agenda, decides what youngsters will learn and ushers her pupils toward that destination. "Student-directed" learning is an old progressive-educator notion. It means that children's own interests matter more than a pre-set curriculum in shaping what teachers and pupils work on in class each day and what approach they take to learning. Yet it's nearly impossible to imagine standards-based reform succeeding in places where students decide what will be learned - or even how it is learned. Standards-based reform presupposes that teachers take charge of prescribing the skills and knowledge to be learned - and persist until their young charges actually learn those things. Plenty of research shows that teacher-led instruction matters most for disadvantaged kids. [For starters, see The Academic Achievement Challenge, by Jeanne S. Chall, New York: The Guilford Press, 2000.]

Second, three quarters of teachers have embraced the college-of-education dogma that the purpose of schooling is to help youngsters "learn how to learn" rather than to acquire specific information and skills. Barely one in seven believes that educators' core responsibility is "to teach students specific information and skills." When evaluating pupil work, just 25 percent of 4th (and 28 percent of 8th grade teachers) place primary emphasis on whether students supply the right answer or correct information. Yet standards-based reform is all about the successful acquisition of specific information and skills. Few would deny that schools should also assist their pupils to "learn how to learn" more in the future. But standards-based reform cannot succeed where that is deemed to be the school's chief mission. Nor can it succeed where teachers put greater stock in student creativity and effort than in accuracy.

Third, not even two-fifths of 4th grade teachers base the pupils' grades primarily on a "single, class-wide standard"; most place heavier emphasis on individual youngsters' abilities. In other words, they opt for a relativistic mode of evaluating achievement instead of an unchanging, objective standard. (This is also the case with nearly half of 8th grade teachers.) Yet the essence of standards-based reform is judging students according to their success in meeting a fixed standard of learning. How unfortunate it will be if kids grow accustomed in class to relativistic grading practices, only to be hit by an unyielding standard on the statewide exam at year's end. How confusing for them and their parents-and how damaging to standards-based reform.

Fourth, teachers do not have terribly high expectations for their pupils. Despite the endlessly repeated mantra that "all children can learn" and Congress's assertion that no child will be left behind and all will attain their states' core academic standards, teachers do not quite buy that. Fewer than half of those teaching 4th grade expect their students always to spell correctly. Less than half of 8th grade math teachers expect all their students, by year's end, to be able to show why the angles of a triangle add to 180 degrees. (One quarter of 8th grade math teachers do not even expect this from a majority of their pupils.) Only 70 percent of 8th grade history teachers expect that, by the time they enter high school, most students in their classes will know when the Civil War was fought. What does it mean for Congress to mandate that every child in every state will (within twelve years) attain "proficiency" on state standards when many classroom instructors have no such expectations? Though the survey didn't ask, we can fairly assume that the kids for whom teachers harbor lower expectations are those from poor and minority neighborhoods and troubled homes - those who traditionally have been most apt to be left behind.

Fifth and most bluntly, one third of 4th grade teachers and 30 percent of 8th grade teachers do not agree that "a teacher's role is primarily to help students learn the things that your state or community has decided students should know." In other words, they seemingly don't believe in state academic standards at all. At least, they don't see helping youngsters meet such standards as the school's core mission.

There's no point in castigating teachers, much less the conscientious instructors who cooperated with this survey, for harboring these attitudes. They are what they are, what they've been molded into by those who trained them yesterday and supervise them today. For the most part, their attitudes, expectations and priorities, as well as the methods they employ when the classroom door is closed, reflect the influence of their ed-school professors as well as mentors and peers within the schools and the profession.

The problem is that the professors and the profession have not entirely bought into standards-based reform. It goes against their grain. It contradicts their philosophies of education. Never mind that it's the law of the land, the principal public-education dynamic of nearly every state, and the strong preference of most parents. Where well implemented, it also boosts student achievement, especially for disadvantaged youngsters. Yet it hasn't permeated the education profession. Hence it hasn't percolated into many teachers. The problem ahead is that policymakers - and parents, voters and taxpayers - are destined for a whopping disappointment if what happens when the classroom door closes does not advance the goals that were so hopefully enshrined in those statutes, those hard-fought standards, and those sometimes onerous accountability systems. An education train wreck may lie ahead.

A version of this editorial appeared in Sunday's New York Post.

When Edison Schools filed its 2002 annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 30, the world learned two things: that the firm's financial situation was unsteady and that there have been changes to its board of directors. The report revealed that Edison could have some financial problems if the company does not meet certain "financial ratios" specified by Merrill Lynch and School Services, which currently provide Edison with a $55 million credit line. If Edison fails to meet the requirements, it will no longer have access to the credit and would have to pay back any borrowed money immediately. The report also disclosed the resignations of three members of the board of directors, William Weld, Jeffrey Leeds, and Jonathan Newcomb. Leeds, Weld, and Co., a company in which all three men are partners, participated in the $40 million financing that Edison announced in August.

As of earlier this week, Edison was having troubled collecting $3 million from the Philadelphia School District because the company has not yet submitted to the district certain financial documents and a legal agreement allowing Philadelphia to keep all supplies purchased by the company should Edison quit or go out of business. In lieu of this agreement, the district has filed papers in Delaware (where Edison is incorporated) to ensure ownership of supplies in case of an Edison collapse. Edison says it will provide the necessary documents to Philadelphia as soon as it works out some details with its financial backers.

In the last few weeks, Philadelphia schools chief Paul Vallas has vetoed some Edison management decisions and has prevented the firm from moving its administrative staff into one of the schools it is managing. Still, Vallas and Edison maintain that they have a stable working relationship. Vallas says that Edison has most of its Philadelphia schools under control, but Gillespie Middle School is an exception; the district recently deployed five police officers and 15 non-teaching assistants there after a meeting between district officials, teachers, and Edison's Philadelphia operations manager. Edison's financial concerns may continue to make news, but many, including Vallas, are withholding judgment of the company until they see whether Edison's schools in Philadelphia will demonstrate improved student achievement.

"In fiscal filing with SEC, Edison cites cash concern," by Martha Woodall, Dale Mezzacappa, and Susan Snyder, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 1, 2002 (available for a fee at www.philly.com/inquirer)

"School District Withholds Edison Money," Associated Press, October 2, 2002

"Edison Schools gets demerit for tardy disclosure," by Michael Erman, Reuters Company News, October 2, 2002

"District delays Edison's pay; police, aides sent to school," by Martha Woodall and Dale Mezzacappa, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 5, 2002

"Edison, Philly schools chief out to rocky start," Associated Press, October 7, 2002

Disillusioned with the corporate world, discouraged by the dot-com bust and idealistic about making a difference in the world, some of today's most motivated and ambitious young professionals are joining the battle to better our nation's education system, often by creating companies and organizations that aim to help schools improve. Many of these rising stars got their start as Teach for America volunteers in the early nineties, explains Jay Mathews in "Entrepreneurs Grab the Chance to Build Careers, Help Schools," The Washington Post, Tuesday, October 8, 2002

Dana Foundation
2002

If you care about educating children in the arts, you may benefit from this 157-page handbook published by the Dana Foundation and based on a symposium that Dana sponsored a year ago. It contains thousands of tips, conceptual and practical advice for anyone interested in creating an "arts-centered" school, charter or otherwise, and fascinating glimpses of a number of such schools that are operating today. It defines the arts broadly, its examples range widely and its essays span a wide array of school issues and perspectives. Surf to http://www.dana.org/books/press/artshandbook/artsbook.pdf.

edited by Daniel J. Losen and Gary Orfield
2002

As the debate heats up over the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the issue of black children being overindentified as "children with special needs" is receiving increased attention. According to Losen and Orfield, "black students are nearly three times as likely as white students to be labeled mentally retarded." It is widely known that public schools place a disproportionate number of minority students into special education programs and classes, and for far too many of these youngsters, special ed turns out to be a treadmill from which it is almost impossible to disembark. The system helps to block these children from the mainstream of American society. What to do? The authors of this book (from Harvard's Civil Rights Project) offer a number of solutions, some a lot more appealing than others:

• Improving the quality of education children receive in the earliest grades so they are not burdened with deficits that lead to the "special ed" label in the first place.
  
• Supporting the No Child Left Behind Act's demand to end the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by insisting that all children achieve to a high standard.
  
• Using the courts to ensure that children are educated in the least restrictive environment as required by law.
  
• Strengthening Washington's hand in enforcing IDEA and monitoring state compliance.
  
• A moratorium on the use of high stakes tests for determining who receives a high school diploma and advances to the next grade until all children are provided with adequate opportunities to master the curriculum.
  
• Boosting special education funding by $2.5 billion each year until 2007, at which time Congress will meet its 40 percent commitment.

And on and on. This book lays out an agenda for special education reform from the perspective of those wanting to use schools to social engineer their vision of racial equality. To achieve this goal, they believe a big, intrusive government is a reasonable price to pay. To check out the press release for the book and learn how to obtain it, go to http://www.law.harvard.edu/civilrights/press_releases/special_ed.html.

George C. Leaf and Roxana Burris, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
October 2002

George C. Leaf and Roxana Burris wrote this 55-page report for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It does a good job of setting forth key failings of the current system of institutional accreditation. (One may worry, though, about its historical accuracy. It refers twice to a 1952 "higher education act" that I don't believe existed.) A number of its recommendations are sound. One big one, however, is at best na??ve: the suggestion that Washington stop requiring accreditation as a precondition for eligibility for federal student aid dollars and instead trust the market, assuming that students won't enroll in bad schools. Would that it were so. All sorts of private and peer rating services (such as the famous U.S. News guides) help, but people are still easily duped by false claims made by colleges and their "proprietary" counterparts. At least until Americans have decent comparative information as to the academic value added by individual institutions - which would require a sophisticated testing and/or tracking system that the higher education "community" staunchly opposes - I don't see that the consumer marketplace is an adequate replacement for accreditation, despite the latter system's myriad flaws. Have a look at http://www.goacta.org/Reports/accrediting.pdf.

Jolley Bruce Christman and Amy Rhodes, Consortium for Policy Research in Education and Research for Action
June 2002

We join in mourning the recent death of Ambassador Walter Annenberg, whose belief in public education led him to make extraordinarily generous gifts to organizations and communities that thought they knew how to reform it. Even as he is laid to rest, some of those groups persist in trying to prove that they accomplished more than they did or to rationalize their failure. Nowhere has that endeavor been more dogged than in Annenberg's own Philadelphia, where the effort to evaluate and justify the city's "Children Achieving" program continues unabated at the hands of the Penn-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education and an outfit called Research for Action. This latest report was written by Jolley Bruce Christman and Amy Rhodes, both affiliated with the latter organization. It seeks to appraise the "civic infrastructure" undergirding the city's Annenberg program (which was also former superintendent David Hornbeck's signature reform program) and, as I read it, to lay upon Philadelphia's civic leaders (business, academic, philanthropic, grassroots, etc.) a sizable share of the blame for the demise of Children Achieving and the school system's subsequent takeover by the state. Perhaps most interesting here - reminiscent of Moynihan's "Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding," the seminal analysis of the War on Poverty's community action program - is the authors' exegesis of how various factions within Philadelphia's civic leadership held differing "theories of action" as to the essential nature of the problems facing the school system and the strategies for solving them. In other words, different groups looked at the same school system and saw different ailments and cures, yet each thought it spotted its own within the Children Achieving program. The result was cacophony and fragmentation, no real shared understanding of the nature or mission of the program. Hence, according to these diagnosticians, not a lot of consensus, not a lot of achievement gain, no big infusion of state money and, in the end, the city's cession to the state of control over its school system. An interesting tale, moderately well told and with possible lessons for others involved in comprehensive urban school reform efforts. If only the authors didn't work quite to hard to shift responsibility for what happened away from the architects of the plan itself. FYI, and perhaps self-servingly, among the other evaluations of the Philadelphia Annenberg program - though not mentioned in this report - is a perceptive and critical review a couple of years back by Carol Innerst on behalf of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. You can find it at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=41. You can find the new report at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/children07.pdf.

Mike Antonucci
October 2002

Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency has produced a short but fact-filled report on the political expenditures of the teacher unions, compiled from innumerable sources. It's really only the tip of an immense iceberg. It does not, for example, include spending for lobbying by union employees and members, nor can it quantify the costs of "issue ads" or internal political communications between union leadership and the rank-and-file. And it doesn't have as many subtotals and totals as one would wish. Still, it's the most informative report of its kind we've ever seen, especially with regard to election year spending by political action committees (PACs) allied with the national unions and their state affiliates. And it's especially timely as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law goes into effect, a law that will, for example, force the unions to redirect some $3 million of PAC money that they've been accustomed to giving directly to the national political parties (mainly the Democrats). You can download this report from http://home.earthlink.net/~mantonucci/voice/voice.pdf.

U.S. Department of Commerce
September 2002

This peculiar report, which exists only in cyberspace, is a compilation of fourteen loosely linked essays that purport to present "visions" of education in a high tech future. Published by the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, it has neither introduction (save for twin letters from Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Education Secretary Rod Paige) nor any conclusions. It doesn't even have consecutive page numbering. Several of the "visions" are pretty interesting, however, as they explore the role of teachers in a technology rich education system and caution against the things that can go wrong if we go overboard in this direction. Authors range from visionary techies to the executive director of the NEA. Have a look if you crave help in picturing the possible impact of technology on education at various levels. You can find it on the web at http://www.ta.doc.gov/reports/TechPolicy/2020Visions.pdf.