The Education Gadfly Weekly

Leslie A. Scott, Steven J. Ingels, and Jeffrey A. Owings
National Center on Education Statistics
September 2007

This blockbuster report (which didn't receive the coverage it deserves) examines whether performance on NAEP could predict matriculation to, and success in, college-and thus whether a certain NAEP score indicates "college readiness." In a nutshell, analysts followed a representative group of students who graduated from middle school in 1988 and, as high-school seniors, took a math test the results of which could be equated to the NAEP's scale. (Students were followed until 2000, when they were about 26 years old.) The results are pretty interesting. Of twelfth-graders who scored below NAEP's "basic" level, about half did not participate in any postsecondary education. Only about a fifth of these students received at least a bachelor's degree; another fifth got a certificate or an associate's degree. Of those twelfth-grade students who did make the basic level, half went to a four-year school, and another quarter to a two-year school. Fifty percent of these "at basic" students walked away with at least a bachelor's degree, and another 12 percent received a certificate or associate's degree. A whopping 84 percent of students scoring at "proficient" matriculated to a four-year school and almost all of them earned at least a bachelor's degree. As for those at the "advanced" level, over ninety percent graduated with four-year degrees, mostly from highly selective or selective institutions. What does that mean in terms of college readiness? The report doesn't say, but here's this reviewer's take: getting kids to NAEP's basic level in mathematics by grade 12 gives them a fifty-fifty shot at graduating with a four-year college degree. Getting them to "proficient" almost guarantees it. Thus, if you want the odds to be in students' favor, the demarcation for college readiness is probably somewhere between basic and proficient. But decide for yourself; the report is here.

Harry Anthony Patrinos and Shobhana Sosale, eds.
September 2007

Countries differ in their social and economic practices, but from the United States to Venezuela to the United Kingdom one can find public-private partnerships (or PPPs) to improve education. The essays in this World Bank volume explore the mechanics of PPPs and their effects. From the U.S., Gregg Vanourek and Checker Finn conclude that charter schools encourage parent involvement and increase efficiency of per-pupil spending. In Latin America, a Colombian public-school program puts high-performing private schools in charge of public schools, most of them in poor areas. While PPPs vary greatly in their specifics, they all work to bring high-quality services to typically disenfranchised groups, and they all rely on the skills of private management. Unfortunately, they also face multiple barriers: fear of private control; church-state separation angst; and unfriendly labor organizations. Dispelling myths about private oversight is therefore key for PPP success, and this book's authors do their best. Check it out here.

Innovations in Education Series
U.S. Department of Education
September 2007Innovations in Education Series
U.S. Department of Education
June 2007

These two reports examine what makes the nation's best charter schools and charter authorizers so good at what they do. The first report profiles seven high-quality charter schools, and identifies 8 common practices at which they excel. In-depth discussions of each practice and individual school profiles offer concrete examples of how schools implement such policies. The heralded Amistad Academy, for instance, requires its students to demonstrate the "REACH" values: respect, enthusiasm, achievement, citizenship, and hard work. The Integrational School in Cleveland closely monitors student reading progress against set benchmarks and sends home clear and detailed report cards. The report on charter authorizing takes the same approach, picking eight exemplars of high-quality authorizing and highlighting six common practices central to their success. These authorizers 1) build strong organizations with talented staffs; 2) recruit qualified faculty and school leaders; 3) employ rigorous criteria for evaluating charter applicants; 4) provide intensive support to new school operators; 5) provide meaningful and transparent long-term oversight; and 6) hold schools accountable for meeting performance goals. Again, detailed examinations of the practices and individual authorizers further illuminate what it takes to do authorizing right. As the charter movement wakes up to the importance of quality authorizing, the models explored here will be ever more valuable for new entrants to the field. Read the schools report here and the authorizing report here.

Neal McCluskey's new book, Feds in the Classroom, is the latest "strict-libertarian" contribution to the world of education reform. Which is to say, sadly, not much of a contribution.

The word "strict" is important, because McCluskey's book refuses to compromise any of its overarching libertarian values for reality's sake. Thus, the reader repeatedly finds himself in the uncomfortable position of wondering: "Does the author actually believe this?"

McCluskey writes, "In the colonial and early national eras," when government did not control the schools, "American education worked, more or less, optimally." Does the author actually believe this? For colonial-era blacks and women, American education was an unqualified disaster.  

Such illogic is not unusual when libertarian writers seek to apply a strict form of their philosophy to education reform. Readers must repeatedly endure odd passages that trumpet the glory of 17th Century schools and abolition of government and suchlike.

But strict libertarianism fails in education reform not merely because of its political infeasibility, but because it prizes individual liberty so greatly that it must allow parents to make dreadful educational choices that could set up their children for failure. Thus, the strict libertarian's k-12 paradox: Allowing parents the liberty to make such decisions on their children's behalf stymies liberty (the child's rights, really) more than encourages it.

If we returned to an education system modeled on, say, the colonial one--in which government did not compel children to attend class and in which parents could send their children (or not) to any privately run institution that claimed to be a school--what would be the results? Just to being, a lot of disadvantaged children wouldn't learn to read or write, which was perhaps permissible in 1707 but in 2007 is a recipe for squalor. 

The United States in many cases allows adults to make unwise decisions for themselves. But when possible and morally permissible, it should stop adults from making similarly devastating choices for their children.

A less-doctrinaire libertarian approach, on the other hand, can add much to education-reform discussions by pointing out government's inefficiencies and ineptitudes (see here and here). Libertarians who compare private sector successes to bureaucratic incompetence, for example, often illuminate useful ways to improve our k-12 system.

The best libertarian writing about education makes sophisticated arguments for incremental change. It is able to merge libertarian principles with the understanding that society has an obligation to educate its future members-and with the realization that the U.S. is simply not going to immediately close all its public schools.

Feds in the Classroom makes no such compromises. Of its 199 pages, just seven are devoted to the future of education reform, and they contain such nonstarters as this: "All federal intervention in education ... must be eliminated."

Umm, no. That language may be fine in the halls of academe, where one can still encounter the harrumphing Marxist professor or the uncompromising Ayn Rand devotee-both, usually, aging fast and gracelessly.

Maybe undergraduates take them seriously. Policymakers ought not.

Libertarians have much to offer to education-policy discussions, as do paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, and even some stripes of liberals. But in the k-12 arena, ideology should inform perspective, not define it. 

Last week, we wrote that Bob Herbert's New York Times columns are "either off-base or banal." He repaid us by referring to our new study, The Proficiency Illusion, in an off-base manner, as part of his banal October 9th piece "High-Stakes Flimflam." Herbert's title referred not to his own writing, but to the k-12 tests that have "largely failed to magically swing open the gates of successful learning." He argues that because, according to Harvard's Daniel Koretz, it's difficult to trust that high-stakes tests aren't being gamed, and because Fordham found that "proficiency" cut scores vary from stateto state, we should quit testing. "It's time to rein in the test zealots who have gotten such a stranglehold on the public schools in the U.S.," Herbert writes. Can Gadfly be quoted yawning? Too bad Herbert took the least intellectually rigorous approach to our report's findings (as others have done differently with similar criticism). Instead of considering improving the tests, or perhaps suggesting the implementation of a national assessment, our fearless columnist took the boring and uninformed road most traveled: scrap the whole thing. Oh well.

"High-Stakes Flimflam," by Bob Herbert, New York Times, October 9, 2007  

"Why Bob Herbert is wrong," Thomas B. Fordham Institute, October 9, 2007

Seems that lightning has struck once again in Florida. After making some of largest early-grade NAEP improvements in the nation, the Sunshine State is now attempting to beef up its accountability system for high-school students. And in a shocking display of common sense, politicians in Tallahassee are looking beyond their state's borders for good ideas. A bipartisan group of state legislators is set to make a November trip to New York to examine the end of course, high school Regents exams, which are among the country's most rigorous. This comes at a time when Florida's state test, the FCAT, is undergoing serious scrutiny: many districts are questioning whether FCAT accurately assesses their high-school students (see here), and recent scoring glitches in the elementary grades haven't boosted confidence, either. But instead of tossing the accountability baby out with the bathwater, instead of decrying testing and all it stands for, Florida policymakers seem to be showing a willingness to make mid-course corrections. We'll raise our Mojitos to that.

"FCAT may face rival," by Ron Matus and Steve Bousquet, St. Petersburg Times, October 6, 2007

Passed by Congress in late 2001 and signed by President George W. Bush one year after his inauguration, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is the most ambitious federal education statute ever.

After five years of experience with a statute that aims to produce "universal proficiency" (in math and reading, mainly in grades 3-8) by 2014, and with reauthorization looming, it's time to draw some conclusions about how NCLB has unfolded on the ground--and how it ought to be changed.

Much has been written about NCLB's particular testing regimen. Far less has been written about the law's remedies, whereby a Title I school that fails to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) is subject to a parade of stiffening interventions designed to change it and give new options to its students. Our new book pries into this facet of NCLB to examine these remedies and their effectiveness (you can read more about our findings here and here).

But as Congress sets about reauthorizing the law, diving into its innards to tweak this and that, it will pay insufficient heed to NCLB's main problem, which is not concerned with tests or remedies but with philosophy.

The law began with the noble yet naïve promise that every U.S. schoolchild will attain "proficiency" in reading and math by 2014. While there is no doubt that the number of "proficient" students can and should increase dramatically from today's 30-ish percent (using the National Assessment definition of proficiency), and while the achievement of children below the proficient level also can and should rise closer to proficiency, no educator in America believes that universal proficiency will, in fact, be attained by 2014, not, at least, by any reasonabled definition of proficiency. Only politicians promise such things. The inevitable result is cynicism and frustration among educators and a "compliance" mentality among state and local officials. (See here, here, and here.)

At its heart, today's NCLB amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.

There is evidence from states such as Florida and California that the act is causing them to restructure reasonably good schools, to confound their own pre-existing (and sometimes superior) accountability regimens, and to fracture coherent school improvement strategies. NCLB is also pushing states to move aggressively in too many schools at once, ensuring that capacity won't be up to the challenges at hand.

Whatever the political value of promising to "leave no child behind," the results thus far threaten to undermine two decades of hard-won gains on educational accountability. NCLB's dogmatic aspirations and cobbled-together design are producing a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve.

It's time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the limits of federal action in the American system. In the end, Washington is not well-positioned to effect radical change in a sphere that depends primarily on state and local action, or successfully to require states and districts to adopt measures whose efficacy hinges on gusto and creativity rather than compliance.

No matter how finely the legislative craftsmen tune NCLB 2.0, powerful cultural and political forces will continue to impede school improvement. A sense of urgency and outsized aspirations is commendable, but there's a world of difference between determination and delusion. We have spent forty years since the LBJ era learning how hard school reform actually is. Yet too many otherwise serious people, such as the members of the Aspen-based NCLB Commission, sustain that pretense, indeed worsen it by suggesting that sixty-plus technocratic changes and considerably more federal control will cure what ails the law.

Wrong. What Washington can do best, given the structure of the American federal system, is deploy its "bully pulpit" to change the political climate, set common standards, collect and disseminate data, cultivate research and technical expertise, nurture pioneering state efforts and cast a spotlight upon them, and promote a clear understanding of what constitutes unacceptable school performance. Given different machinery, Washington might be able to do more. Until that day comes, however, responsible governance demands that the feds do what they can do well-and not sacrifice hard-won gains in the service of sloganeering.

This piece was adapted from No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-decade of NCLB, recently published by the AEI press. This book will be discussed at a forum on October 16th (see here).

In 2005-06, a significantly higher percentage of white teacher candidates in Massachusetts passed the required Communications and Literacy Skills exam than their black and Hispanic counterparts. The state's Educational Personnel Advisory Council--a tasty morsel of bureaucratese, that--has been asked to determine whether this gap reflects bias in the test. But common sense and Charles Glenn, who writes in the Boston Globe, tell us that the scores are simply the result of the education system itself, one that exhibits similar racial disparities in student achievement. If the k-12 (and postsecondary) system does a poor job of educating poor and minority students, why does it surprise us when they perform poorly on subsequent exams? Furthermore, everybody knows that there's a link between teachers' performance on tests such as this one and the future achievement of their pupils. Lest you think, however, that the exam itself is above blame, consider this: according to Glenn, ed school dean at Boston University, the exam tests for high school-level skills. Don't you think, dear Massachusetts legislator, that teachers should be at least a little more qualified than the students they're teaching?

"High standards for teachers," by Charles Glenn, Boston Globe, October 6, 2007

Harry Anthony Patrinos and Shobhana Sosale, eds.
September 2007

Countries differ in their social and economic practices, but from the United States to Venezuela to the United Kingdom one can find public-private partnerships (or PPPs) to improve education. The essays in this World Bank volume explore the mechanics of PPPs and their effects. From the U.S., Gregg Vanourek and Checker Finn conclude that charter schools encourage parent involvement and increase efficiency of per-pupil spending. In Latin America, a Colombian public-school program puts high-performing private schools in charge of public schools, most of them in poor areas. While PPPs vary greatly in their specifics, they all work to bring high-quality services to typically disenfranchised groups, and they all rely on the skills of private management. Unfortunately, they also face multiple barriers: fear of private control; church-state separation angst; and unfriendly labor organizations. Dispelling myths about private oversight is therefore key for PPP success, and this book's authors do their best. Check it out here.

Innovations in Education Series
U.S. Department of Education
September 2007Innovations in Education Series
U.S. Department of Education
June 2007

These two reports examine what makes the nation's best charter schools and charter authorizers so good at what they do. The first report profiles seven high-quality charter schools, and identifies 8 common practices at which they excel. In-depth discussions of each practice and individual school profiles offer concrete examples of how schools implement such policies. The heralded Amistad Academy, for instance, requires its students to demonstrate the "REACH" values: respect, enthusiasm, achievement, citizenship, and hard work. The Integrational School in Cleveland closely monitors student reading progress against set benchmarks and sends home clear and detailed report cards. The report on charter authorizing takes the same approach, picking eight exemplars of high-quality authorizing and highlighting six common practices central to their success. These authorizers 1) build strong organizations with talented staffs; 2) recruit qualified faculty and school leaders; 3) employ rigorous criteria for evaluating charter applicants; 4) provide intensive support to new school operators; 5) provide meaningful and transparent long-term oversight; and 6) hold schools accountable for meeting performance goals. Again, detailed examinations of the practices and individual authorizers further illuminate what it takes to do authorizing right. As the charter movement wakes up to the importance of quality authorizing, the models explored here will be ever more valuable for new entrants to the field. Read the schools report here and the authorizing report here.

Leslie A. Scott, Steven J. Ingels, and Jeffrey A. Owings
National Center on Education Statistics
September 2007

This blockbuster report (which didn't receive the coverage it deserves) examines whether performance on NAEP could predict matriculation to, and success in, college-and thus whether a certain NAEP score indicates "college readiness." In a nutshell, analysts followed a representative group of students who graduated from middle school in 1988 and, as high-school seniors, took a math test the results of which could be equated to the NAEP's scale. (Students were followed until 2000, when they were about 26 years old.) The results are pretty interesting. Of twelfth-graders who scored below NAEP's "basic" level, about half did not participate in any postsecondary education. Only about a fifth of these students received at least a bachelor's degree; another fifth got a certificate or an associate's degree. Of those twelfth-grade students who did make the basic level, half went to a four-year school, and another quarter to a two-year school. Fifty percent of these "at basic" students walked away with at least a bachelor's degree, and another 12 percent received a certificate or associate's degree. A whopping 84 percent of students scoring at "proficient" matriculated to a four-year school and almost all of them earned at least a bachelor's degree. As for those at the "advanced" level, over ninety percent graduated with four-year degrees, mostly from highly selective or selective institutions. What does that mean in terms of college readiness? The report doesn't say, but here's this reviewer's take: getting kids to NAEP's basic level in mathematics by grade 12 gives them a fifty-fifty shot at graduating with a four-year college degree. Getting them to "proficient" almost guarantees it. Thus, if you want the odds to be in students' favor, the demarcation for college readiness is probably somewhere between basic and proficient. But decide for yourself; the report is here.