The Education Gadfly Weekly

Martin R. West and Paul E. Peterson, Editors
The Brookings Institution
2007

This weighty collection offers a broad look at the many issues surrounding so-called "adequacy" lawsuits, through which far too many courts have found bases in state constitutions to impose education spending mandates on their legislative and executive branches. Aficionados of this issue will want to read it in conjunction with Eric Hanushek's fine recent volume (see here), although Hanushek's work focuses primarily on the flimsiness of the adequacy arguments. This book covers that ground, too (indeed, Hanushek contributes a chapter on the "alchemy" of the funding calculations). But its 360 pages go farther. Rick Hess shows, for example, that adequacy lawsuit victories have not necessarily translated into policy changes. Joe Williams and Christopher Berry offer similar assessments (though Berry finds some evidence that such suits are associated with increased state funding and decreased inequity). Other chapters examine the interplay between adequacy suits and standards-based reform and prognosticate the future of adequacy suits (which may not be bright). You can order your copy here.

Mitchell B. Pearlstein
Center of the American Experiment
January 2007

This piece is more of an extended op-ed than a report, but it shines nonetheless. Pearlstein (president of Minnesota's Center of the American Experiment) takes readers through the main points of the voucher debate in a methodical, easy-to-digest narrative. He focuses on the Twin Cities and ties his discussion into their school reform efforts. Pearlstein starts by showing that achievement gaps are bigger in the Twin Cities than almost anywhere else and that black students achieve at higher levels in private schools. In the face of such evidence, he suggests, it's a crime that Minnesota should refuse at least to try vouchers. But opposition still festers, and Pearlstein spends the rest of the paper attempting to assuage critics' doubts and fears. He draws on relevant research across the country, including exemplary studies by Jay Greene, William Howell and Paul Peterson, and Caroline Hoxby. One by one, he then repels some common criticisms of vouchers. Then he makes a slight detour to reflect on the importance of what goes on outside of school. Pearlstein claims that, regardless of the quality of schools, achievement gaps will never fully close in the current context of high divorce rates, crime, out-of-wedlock births, and even negative media influence. If there's a little exaggeration here, Pearlstein may be forgiven. He's offered a passionate defense of a policy that's long been denied to the many children who could benefit from it. Read it here.

When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa decided to reform his city's schools, he likely didn't know what all he was getting into. An incident last week, when the mayor took a cadre of journalists to visit an L.A. high school and a student spray painted his bus with graffiti, is representative. Already hurt by the drawn-out challenges to his school takeover plan (now languishing in the courts), the mayor is now struggling to get allies elected to the school board. Seeking a friendly majority on the Board of Education, Villaraigosa will have to prevail in two runoff elections in May between his favored candidates and those backed by the L.A. teachers' union, which likes the school system and its governance arrangements just the way they are. As the process drags on, the mayor seems to be making more enemies than friends. Board member Maguerite Poindexter LaMotte, who just won a hard-fought battle against charter school founder and reformer Johnathan Williams, said about working with the mayor, "It's going to take some time for me to be conciliatory." Warning to other would-be "education mayors": fixing schools ain't beanball.

"Villaraigosa's frustration," The Economist, March 8, 2007 (subscription required)

"Battle over L.A. schools shifts to May runoff," by Joel Rubin and Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2007  

Call it what you want--buyer's remorse, reverting to form, Hoekstra's rebellion--but Congressional conservatives aren't going to accept NCLB version 2.0 without a fight. Rather, they're bent on emasculating or repealing it. That's the gist of House and Senate bills introduced today that would allow states to opt out of most of the federal law's requirements while keeping the money flowing. The Washington Post reports that the bills' authors have already lined up more than fifty GOP supporters--more than voted against NCLB the first time around--including House minority whip Roy Blunt and FOW (Friend of W.) John Cornyn, Senator from Texas. In the background, the Heritage Foundation is trying to resuscitate the 90's era "Straight A's" proposal, which NCLB, in the interest of bipartisanship, pretty much ignored. The concept was to give states lots of freedom to spend their federal education dollars in return for demonstrable, measurable, and improved academic results. This was the same reasoning as charter schools getting freedom in return for results. Unfortunately, today's bills deliver only the first part of that deal: lots of freedom without any coherent metric by which to know whether states' results are satisfactory. (No, we don't trust them to grade their own papers.) If the operational flexibility being proposed here were joined to the results-based accountability and comparability created by national standards and tests, you'd have a winning combination. Now all that's needed is a Republican presidential candidate willing to make that obvious case.

"Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush's Prized ‘No Child' Act," by Jonathan Weisman and Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, March 15, 2007

This month's Atlantic includes a thoughtful article by Jonathan Rauch about how to end the culture wars: "slug them out state by state." He points to the cautionary tale of Roe v. Wade, which nationalized an intensely controversial issue:

Abortion started in the state legislatures, where it was sometimes contentious but hardly the stuff of a nationwide culture war... In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some liberal-minded states began easing restrictive abortion laws. When the Supreme Court nationalized the issue, in 1973, it short-circuited a debate that was only just getting started. By doing that, it moved abortion out of the realm of normal politics, which cuts deals and develops consensus, and into the realm of protest politics, which rejects compromise and fosters radicalism.

The experience on gay marriage has been markedly different, Rauch argues, because the federal government has (so far) stayed out of the fray, allowing states to craft laws in line with their own differing political, cultural, and historical values. "The result," writes Rauch, "is a diversity of practice that mirrors the diversity of opinion. And gay marriage, not incidentally, is moving out of the realm of protest politics and into the realm of normal politics; in the 2006 elections, the issue was distinctly less inflammatory than two years earlier."

Are there lessons here for the reading wars? They too seemed intractable at one point, but by the late 1990s, following the trail first blazed by Jeanne Chall thirty years earlier, a consensus coalesced around the National Reading Panel and its "scientifically based reading research," at least among reading scientists. The research-based approach was comprehensive (not merely phonics) but clear about what does and doesn't work (just immersing kids in literature doesn't, especially for those youngsters in greatest need of help in learning to read). Groups on the left (such as the AFT) and right (such as Fordham) promulgated these ideas and gave them political cover. And several states began to incorporate the research into their policies.

The "consensus", of course, was limited to people who actually understood reading science and took it seriously--and those policy makers, publishers and practitioners who took them seriously. Nonstop guerilla fighting also continued.

Then came Reading First. Surveying a national landscape that was trending toward research-based reading practices but not fast enough, the federal government sought to end the state-by-state, ed-school-by-ed-school, association-by-association reading wars with a focused, well-funded, heavy-handed, but effective approach. Based on what we know today, one could fairly argue that the program has been both a clear success in terms of student reading gains and a massive failure in terms of sustaining, much less widening, the reading-education consensus. Reading First became a big fat target for "whole language" fundamentalists and guerillas--publishers whose products could show no evidence of effectiveness and ed school ideologues happy to rail against science. Now these folks are coming into possession of heavier artillery, pressuring the Department of Education's Inspector General and Congressional committees to fire away on their behalf, seeding anti-scientific articles in the New York Times, and otherwise escalating the reading wars-cum-culture-wars. Once again, the reading debate has entered, in Rauch's words, the "realm of protest politics, which rejects compromise and fosters radicalism."

Is there any way of returning reading to the "realm of normal politics, which cuts deals and develops consensus"? Should we "slug it out state by state"? That approach holds some appeal. A federal focus on "whatever works"--being demanding about the results to be achieved in terms of student learning but agnostic as to particular teaching strategies--is more in line with Washington's limited capacity to influence schools that are two or three steps removed from its power. Reading First's "what works" approach requires much more federal prescription than our education system is accustomed to; political pushback was inevitable. (For more on the "whatever works" versus "what works" debate, see here.) Individuals like former Reading First director Chris Doherty are caught in the cross-fire. Doherty was impugned for conscientiously doing what Congress and the President asked him to do: make sure that federal dollars flow only to scientifically-based programs. His only true blunder was being candid in a series of e-mails about how he was going about it.

If we had decent national standards and tests (which would indeed mean short-circuiting state-by-state debates about what students should learn and thus likely cause wars of its own), maybe the feds could then allow local flexibility in how students learn. If we added national standards and tests that measured results, Washington could use a lighter hand with regard to means. And if some states (or their districts and schools) foreswear scientifically-based reading strategies, the results will be clear in their reading test scores.

That strategy would make more sense if scientifically-based research had a fair chance in a state-by-state fight. It may not. The reading wars have raged for more than half a century; by all accounts, ed school professors and their soul mates and trainees in state education departments and local school districts are still in the thrall of whole language. Maybe the National Reading Panel was merely a high-point for the scientifically-based reading crowd, not a sign of things to come.

Furthermore, while this debate is primarily a fight between fundamentalism (whole language) and science, there's also big money at stake. Purveyors of whole language programs have a strong incentive to fight to the end. Say what you will about partisans in the abortion or gay marriage debates, they certainly aren't motivated by money. Maybe the reading wars aren't fundamentally a culture war, after all.

What do you think? Did nationalizing the reading wars make them worse? Would scientifically-based reading fare better in a post-Reading First world? Or do advocates of reading science need to win the battle to keep Reading First alive? Send a note to [email protected]; we'll share some of the most thoughtful responses in next week's Gadfly.

The Beastie Boys once spurred angst-ridden teens to fight for their right to party. Today, with parents growing ever more litigious and administrators reacting by instituting inane rules, students have to fight for their right to talk rather than whisper during lunch (see here and here). But despite the increase in campus regulation, school staffs remain at risk. Take, for example, the case of Joseph Frederick, which the Supreme Court will hear next week. After Frederick unfurled a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," his school's principal, Deborah Morse, suspended him for ten days. If the Court finds in Frederick's favor (that his free speech was violated), Morse could be held personally liable and face severe financial penalties. That's how the infamous 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, at least--and because Morse's actions violated Frederick's rights, she is not entitled to immunity from the lawsuit. Regardless of whether or not advocating bong hits is protected speech, if this precedent stands, students and parents can expect schools to become even more rule-bound and stifling than they already are.

"Rights at Stake in Free-Speech Case," by Mark Walsh, Education Week, March 9, 2007 (subscription required)

"Justices to Hear Landmark Free-Speech Case," by Robert Barnes, Washington Post, March 13, 2007

Exxon Mobil is concerned about U.S. math and science education, so it has decided to pay kids to study. The company is pouring $125 million (a bit more than one day's profits) into the National Math and Science Initiative, which will reward students by paying them cash for each English, science, or math AP test on which they receive a score of 3 or higher. As usual, such pay-for-performance tactics have folks huffing. Robert Schaeffer of FairTest says the program is "basing education reform on a series of bribes to kids and bounties to teachers." Leading us to wonder: does FairTest "bribe" Schaeffer to come to work each day by offering him a salary? The program on which the Texas initiative is based has shown solid results in Dallas, so why not give it a chance to work on a broader scale? If the job of kids is to study and learn, why not attach a salary to that hard work?

"Initiative Will Pay Students to Pass AP Tests," by John Hechinger and Susan Warren, Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2007 (subscription required)

"Education initiative expands state programs nationwide," by Sudeep Reddy, Dallas Morning News, March 10, 2007

Charter schools are no longer in their infancy. They're gangly, pimply, headstrong, unpredictable teen-agers. It's been 15 years since the first school in Minnesota opened its doors. Back then, say veterans of the early charter wars, the struggle was simply to keep the spark glowing, to make sure that lawmakers gave charters a chance to open and prove their worth.

Today, charter schools are educating a million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia. Many of these schools are excellent. In Boston, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, some of the top-performing public schools are charters. This is a stunning accomplishment for a movement not yet quite old enough to drive.

Such claims are harder to make in Fordham's home state of Ohio, where we've been helping to propagate the charter idea for a decade and sponsoring a handful of charter schools since 2005.

In the Buckeye State today, those who care about the education of needy youngsters are stuck between two less-than-satisfactory options. The first--Governor Strickland's approach--is to support traditional district schools, despite decades of evidence--persistently low test scores, high drop-out rates--of how poorly they meet many children's needs, particularly in Ohio's "big eight" cities (not to mention his recently proposed charter school moratorium). Yet fixing them is incredibly hard because they are set in their ways, rule bound, bureaucratic and union-whipped. (The union influence explains at least part of the Governor's policies.)

Option two is to embrace the state's 300+ charter schools, some of which are indeed excellent, but too many of which are appalling. The latest example is the Harte-Crossroads Schools in Columbus, where poor management and a disgraceful contract arrangement with the school's money-grubbing sponsor have left the schools in dire academic and financial straits (see here). Charter-school doctrine says that the "movement" is supposed to police itself, with authorizers shuttering bad schools and somebody--usually not very clear who--pushing on authorizers to do the right thing. Yet collections of charter schools (and at times, authorizers) have become interest groups in their own right and some of the self-policing, self-correcting mechanisms don't work so well in practice. (The same politics that make it hard to close traditional public schools make it also hard to close charter schools, alas. The GOP-dominated Ohio legislature is trying to find ways of ensuring that this happens, without killing the teen-ager on account of his acne.)

Ohio's charter saga has yielded some important, sometimes painful, lessons for the national charter movement. Five of the most sobering:

1. Good charter schools are difficult and costly to open and run. It's time to end the myth that just about anyone can run a high-performing school and should be allowed to try.
2. Quality authorizers--those organizations that "license" charter schools to operate and ultimately hold them responsible for their results--are as elusive as quality school operators, and not enough attention has been paid to ensuring that they do their jobs right.
3. Authorizers should not profit from doing this important public work. As the primary quality control agent in the charter program, they should focus on monitoring and encouraging their schools, not finding ways to rake in more money.
4. Good charter schools cannot make it on a financial shoestring over the long haul. Educating a state's neediest children with 30 percent less money per pupil (and no public support for facilities) simply doesn't work. Schools should be expected to be efficient but they can't make bricks with no straw and too little clay.
5. Those who believe in charter schools--including state policymakers--must finger the dysfunctional specimens, condemn their failures, and encourage their closing, even as they help recruit better operators and authorizers.

Despite their troubles, Ohio's charter schools can legitimately take credit for two significant achievements. First, they have provided a lifeline to thousands of youngsters, most of them poor and minority, otherwise stuck in failing district schools and lacking other acceptable alternatives. Second, the charter program has put substantial pressure on Ohio's urban school systems to improve their academic performance--and their competitiveness. Charters are spurring overdue district reform and district leaders are embracing innovative ideas and practices, many gleaned from the charter experience.

Charter supporters in other states should take the Buckeye State's lessons to heart when they think through growth strategies, financing, and quality control. To make it through adolescence, teenagers generally need both discipline and support. Ohio's adolescent charter schools have lacked much in both areas.

Martin R. West and Paul E. Peterson, Editors
The Brookings Institution
2007

This weighty collection offers a broad look at the many issues surrounding so-called "adequacy" lawsuits, through which far too many courts have found bases in state constitutions to impose education spending mandates on their legislative and executive branches. Aficionados of this issue will want to read it in conjunction with Eric Hanushek's fine recent volume (see here), although Hanushek's work focuses primarily on the flimsiness of the adequacy arguments. This book covers that ground, too (indeed, Hanushek contributes a chapter on the "alchemy" of the funding calculations). But its 360 pages go farther. Rick Hess shows, for example, that adequacy lawsuit victories have not necessarily translated into policy changes. Joe Williams and Christopher Berry offer similar assessments (though Berry finds some evidence that such suits are associated with increased state funding and decreased inequity). Other chapters examine the interplay between adequacy suits and standards-based reform and prognosticate the future of adequacy suits (which may not be bright). You can order your copy here.

Mitchell B. Pearlstein
Center of the American Experiment
January 2007

This piece is more of an extended op-ed than a report, but it shines nonetheless. Pearlstein (president of Minnesota's Center of the American Experiment) takes readers through the main points of the voucher debate in a methodical, easy-to-digest narrative. He focuses on the Twin Cities and ties his discussion into their school reform efforts. Pearlstein starts by showing that achievement gaps are bigger in the Twin Cities than almost anywhere else and that black students achieve at higher levels in private schools. In the face of such evidence, he suggests, it's a crime that Minnesota should refuse at least to try vouchers. But opposition still festers, and Pearlstein spends the rest of the paper attempting to assuage critics' doubts and fears. He draws on relevant research across the country, including exemplary studies by Jay Greene, William Howell and Paul Peterson, and Caroline Hoxby. One by one, he then repels some common criticisms of vouchers. Then he makes a slight detour to reflect on the importance of what goes on outside of school. Pearlstein claims that, regardless of the quality of schools, achievement gaps will never fully close in the current context of high divorce rates, crime, out-of-wedlock births, and even negative media influence. If there's a little exaggeration here, Pearlstein may be forgiven. He's offered a passionate defense of a policy that's long been denied to the many children who could benefit from it. Read it here.