The Education Gadfly Weekly

Richard L. Allington
2002

A recent Gadfly editorial suggesting there may be too much heavy-handed education legislation on the books [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=34#482] led to a note from Richard L. Allington, the "author/editor" of this new book. Allington is a professor of education at the University of Florida, a member of the "Reading Hall of Fame," and a very unhappy camper when it comes to the National Reading Panel (NRP) and other efforts to describe the "scientific consensus" about how children learn (and should be taught) to read. His new book ends with a stern warning against a "national reading methodology." Most of it consists of authors disputing the NRP's findings and the federal legislation and policies that rest upon those findings - notably NCLB's "Reading First" program. Along the way, the authors go after phonics, testing, accountability, privatization and other demons. Good try, Professor Allington, but I'm unpersuaded. There are many parts of K-12 education where I'm all for flexibility and variety and experimentation, but early reading is one of the few places in education that boasts solid science, and we should honor it. Congress did NOT say everyone must teach phonics. It merely said that federal (reading) dollars will henceforth hinge on it. Nobody needs to take those dollars - and many private schools and home schoolers can't or won't. But just as I wouldn't want Medicaid dollars to pay for leeches and mustard plasters, or NASA dollars to pay for rubber-band-powered planes, I don't believe Education Department monies meant to advance the teaching of reading should support non-scientific approaches. Judging from the number of states that are having to rewrite their Reading First applications - the first round having been rejected for insufficient attention to the scientific consensus-this is proving to be a bitter pill for many educators and bureaucracies. Let them eschew the money, then. But the numerous authors gathered into this 300-page volume fail to disprove that consensus, which in fact did not start with the NRP but at least 35 years ago when the late Jeanne Chall first published Learning to Read: the Great Debate. If you'd like to have a look at this effort to rebut it, the ISBN is 0325005133. The publisher is Heinemann. And you can get further information (provided that someone once taught you to read!) by surfing to http://www.heinemann.com/shared/products/E00513.asp.

California State Auditor
November 2002

The California State Auditor released this examination of four districts that have chartered a larger number of schools, concluding that they're not doing a very good job of it - and may be garnering more state funds than they should to compensate themselves for their weak oversight. The districts (Fresno, Oakland, San Diego, Los Angeles) say it isn't so - and fill more than half of this 216-page report in explaining themselves. With some 436 California charter schools now enrolling upwards of 160,000 pupils, this is a big subject. Charter advocates regard the Auditor's report as a hatchet job, part of the intensifying political campaign to curb these schools' freedoms and restrict their numbers. At the same time, they acknowledge that the California charter-school accountability picture is less than perfect. This has led their statewide association to propose having schools accredited (by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges) and to require added fiscal accountability. State board chairman Reed Hastings suggests that no school should get its charter renewed unless it scores at least a 4 on the state's ten-point Academic Performance Index. (Critics of THAT idea say a "value added" or "progress" measure should be used rather than a fixed standard.) While the Auditor's recommendations for districts (and the State Department of Education) strike me as plausible, the risk, as always in these discussions, is that stepped-up "oversight" by charter authorizers will turn into clumsy over-regulation. Whether that results from mischievousness by charter foes or the innocent inability of bureaucracy-bound authorizers to imagine any other way to live up to their responsibilities, the result could be devastating. But it's not a good thing for schools with bad fiscal practices and woeful educational results to continue unchanged, whether they're charters, traditional public schools or private schools. Someone needs to blow the whistle. The challenge is to find ways to do that without sliding into a mass of red tape. You can find this report online at http://www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/pdfs/2002104.pdf.

UNESCO
2002

This new report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reviews international readiness to attain the target of "education for all" that was set at a Dakar forum in 2000. That meeting produced a "framework" of six extremely ambitious goals for all the planet's countries to attain by 2015 (e.g. "comprehensive early childhood care and education," universal primary education "of good quality," a 50% gain in adult literacy, "especially for women"). This report doesn't actually report on progress since Dakar because 1999 or 2000 is the most recent available data for most of the indicators. Rather, it seeks (in 193 pages) to appraise the prospects of reaching those goals. The sobering if unsurprising bottom line: there's a big gap between the 83 countries (mostly wealthy) that are "on track" and the other 70 (nearly all poor) that aren't. (Some of the latter are actually regressing.) The reasons are numerous, often having to do with macro-political developments, war, and the general economic circumstances in which countries find themselves. One widespread education problem, however, is a big teacher shortage, with an estimated three million more instructors needed in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Like most UNESCO reports, this one calls for lots more foreign aid while staying pretty much "inside the box" in terms of education delivery systems. You will not, for example, find much here about the potential of low-cost private schools such as James Tooley has found in third-world countries [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=36#520], nor anything about how distance learning might jump right over the infrastructure problems associated with building and staffing thousands of rural and village schools. Particularly with the United States rejoining UNESCO, however, readers will want to reacquaint themselves with that organization's work in education, some of which is valuable - especially on the statistics front - but much of which is unimaginative. Download this report at http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/monitoring/monitoring_2002.shtml.

Stig Leschly, Harvard Business School
October 29, 2002

What would happen if training programs for principals focused less on complying with certification rules and more on developing the practical leadership skills that they'll need to be successful in their schools? What if school leaders were recruited from many backgrounds rather than just from the ranks of classroom teachers? Harvard Business School professor Stig Leschly shows what these ideas look like in practice in a case study of New Leaders for New Schools, a promising effort to improve U.S. public education by transforming its approach to school leadership. The brainchild of three quondam graduate students with a passion for helping needy children, New Leaders believes in strengthening education by raising the quality of those who run schools. Begun in 2001, it accepts a small number of top-notch fellows (culled from the business, civic and education sectors) to participate in an intensive summer institute that stresses two themes: 1) becoming a successful instructional leader, and 2) becoming a general manager capable of defining and sustaining a mission-driven organization. After completing the summer program, fellows enter a 10-month, in-school residency during which they are mentored by effective principals. New Leaders has thrived during its first two years and now faces some tough decisions about how to grow without forfeiting quality. Those interested in school leadership and/or the intersection of business theory with education will want to learn more about this project, both as education reform initiative and as entrepreneurial start-up. Copies of this case study - which includes some revealing insights from the program's founders - may be ordered for $6.50 from http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=803073.

Achieve, Inc.
November 2002

Achieve, Inc., the CEO-and-governor led standards-based reform organization, recently issued this 25-page account of reform progress by three of its favorite states (all of which had invited Achieve to review their work in this area.) The conclusion: after a decade or more of effort, standards-based reform is showing good results in all three but they're going about it very differently. "While the states used the same three-part strategy [standards, testing, accountability], the tactics they chose varied a great deal. Each state faced a unique set of circumstances and made different choices along the way. The different paths&suggest that there is more than one way to achieve high standards." For example, Massachusetts has focused entirely on "student stakes" while Maryland laid the accountability burden on schools, and Texas did both. Other differences are interesting, too, as is the ubiquity in all three states of "consistency, consensus and comprehensiveness." This report is a little on the boosterish side, perhaps not giving quite enough ink to stumbles and obstacles that these states encountered along the path, but, then, it was meant to encourage other states. One can only hope that NCLB's valiant effort to standardize many aspects of states' approach to standards-based reform will still permit this kind of constructive variation in more places. See for yourself at http://www.achieve.org/dstore.nsf/Lookup/reportthree-statefinal/$file/reportthree-statefinal.pdf.

Noting that it's better to raise standards than to back down from a higher benchmark, Texas's board of education approved a motion to set a moderate but rising standard for passing the rigorous new TAKS exam. This replaces the celebrated TAAS test, on which many Lone Star students and schools had bumped against the ceiling. The passing standards on TAKS, which are said to roughly match the current expectations of TAAS, are being phased in over several years. Texas's practice with TAAS was to ratchet the passing scores upward and it appears this is the plan for TAKS. (Even so, 15% of 3rd graders are expected to fail the reading test at the outset.) By contrast, Michigan - which led the country in number of failing schools partly as a result of its lofty standards - has, in effect, lowered those standards, "temporarily" changing its definition of a failing school to a "more realistic standard" to avoid federal sanctions. "Students will get two years to master state TAKS exam," by Terrence Stutz, The Dallas Morning News, November 16, 2002, and "Measure of failing schools altered," by Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki, Detroit Free Press, November 15, 2002

Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 earned a "D" average on a recent National Geographic survey of geography and current events. Only 13 percent could identify Iraq on a map of the Middle East, and an astonishing 11 percent failed to locate the U.S. on a global map! The findings echo students' poor performance on the 2001 NAEP geography test [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=50#1380]. "Americans flunk geography, survey finds," Associated Press, Star Tribune, November 20, 2002

Unless you've been wholly absorbed trussing your turkey, you have read of the recent flap concerning Sanford Weill's assistance to Jack Grubman in gaining admission of the latter's twin tykes to the 92nd Street Y's pre-school program in 2000. This ultra-exclusive Upper East Side pre-school program enrolls 175 youngsters and accepts just 65 annually. Zillions of New York City's movers and shakers want to send their daughters and sons there, however, as it is seen as a stepping stone to the city's elite primary and secondary schools and, these, in turn, are seen as paths to the Ivy League and success in life. So there is much jockeying, angling, finagling and influence peddling as wealthy, powerful parents who are accustomed to getting what they want work all their levers to maximize the prospects of their two, three and four year olds during the annual admissions frenzy.

Nearly all the coverage of this episode has focused on the business ethics of Messrs. Grubman and Weill and Citigroup, which Weill heads and which made a million-dollar gift to the Y, evidently in connection with the Grubman children's applications. For his part, Grubman, then a prominent analyst of telecommunications companies for Salomon Smith Barney, seems to have upgraded his rating of AT & T's stock. (Weill allegedly wanted this for an array of complex and questionable reasons.)

New York State's eager-beaver attorney general is all over this case, as is the Securities and Exchange Commission. Well and good. At a time of heightened sensitivity to business ethics - and concern about favoritism and corruption among securities analysts - that seems like the right thing to do. But everybody has ignored the education policy issues that this tawdry "bonfire of the vanities" episode reveals. Two of them struck me.

First, why is it that in New York City, as in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and many other cities, there is such intense competition to get into a handful of swanky private schools? Partly, no doubt, for reasons of snobbery. But much of it has to do with the simple fact that the public schools of those cities hold no allure. In fact, they're downright unacceptable to many families. The evidence need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to note that people of means who care about their children will do practically anything to gain entry for their youngsters into different (safer, better) schools than those supported by their tax dollars. They could move to the suburbs, yes, and many do. Or they can stay in town and pull out all the stops to get their toddlers into those independent schools. (In principle, they could also patronize lesser private schools, where the admissions crush isn't quite so intense - they might even check out the local charter schools - but they're mostly too proud for that.)

They are, in fact, exercising school choice, and much of the reason they're so intent on it is because their cities' public schools don't cut the mustard. Now recall those same cities' tens of thousands of poor families whose kids are just as promising and who care just as much for them but who don't have influential friends and lots of money. What's their alternative? Think of Grubman's grubby saga as a high profile instance of the lengths people will go to to find acceptable alternatives to their neighborhood public school. Should we fix those neighborhood schools? Sure. The sooner the better. In the meantime, however, what about this year's crop of children? Next year's?

Second education issue: why won't the private schools grow? The 92nd Street Y, we read, won't even consider a child for admissions unless its parent is one of the first 300 to phone after the annual entrance sweepstakes opens (at 9 a.m. sharp on the Monday after Labor Day). Imagine all the speed dialers programmed to the school's number that morning, as it is widely believed that thousands of children would apply if the Y let them.

So why doesn't the Y expand? It charges as much as $14,400 a year in pre-school tuition and seems to find plenty of people willing to pay those prices. Why not serve more kids? Maybe even more kids whose families have the interest but lack the means? Don't be ridiculous, goes the response. Exclusive private schools would rather take one applicant in ten than educate more children. Part of their allure is their very exclusiveness, the hordes of youngsters they decline to educate rather than the relative handful that they choose to serve. They also lack the entrepreneurial spark. They are, in fact, complacent. So, in a way, are their clients.

Consider these two paragraphs from Jane Gross's November 15 account in The New York Times of the pre-school admissions sweepstakes in Gotham:

"The pressure to make exceptions can be intense for a nursery director," said Cynthia Bing, who heads the school advisory service at the Parents League of New York, an East Side institution that guides families through the independent school application process.

" 'All over town, are there cases of people calling the head of schools and saying "Pay attention"?,' she asked. 'Sure. And I'm not saying it never helps. But, if they allowed themselves to be pressured by everyone, they'd have to expand the schools to 10 times their size.' "

Ms. Bing takes for granted that expansion is a ridiculous idea, unthinkable, maybe even dreadful. But why? At ten times its size, the 92nd Street Y pre-school would enroll 1750 children. Properly organized and deftly administered, perhaps spread across several locations, that would be a perfectly manageable institution. It would give a top-notch early education to ten times as many youngsters as it does today.

Private schools don't think that way, however, and ought to be ashamed. As should the people responsible for public schools that so many families are desperate to escape. Nobody is exonerating Jack Grubman. But, like tens of thousands of other parents, when it came to his kids' schooling, he found himself caught between a rock and a hard place. Why do we persist with that sort of education system?

"Favoritism in Nursery School Entrance? No Comment," by Jane Gross, The New York Times, November 15, 2002

"The Pre-Kindergarten Connection," editorial, The New York Times, November 16, 2002

"Private Preschool Admissions: Grease and the City," by Stephanie Strom, The New York Times, November 16, 2002

Eliminating a major barrier to classroom entry for recent college graduates and career-switchers, the Keystone State's board of education last week voted to deem "qualified" those teachers who receive training from Teach for America and other national alternative programs. The board also decreed that elementary-certified teachers who instruct seventh- and eighth-graders must pass tests in their subjects in order to be considered highly qualified. "Pa. moves to raise teacher standard," by Dale Mezzacappa, The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 15, 2002

If ever there were a case to be made for allowing principals to hire and fire their staff, Portland's Whittaker Middle School is it. Principal Tom Pickett told The Oregonian that, until a quarter of his current teachers are replaced, pupils in his failing school won't stand much chance of being adequately educated. "School puts out SOS for teachers," by Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian, November 17, 2002

Chicago's public schools reaped little reward for their nearly $200 million investment in professional development last year because the money was spent "without any 'overarching strategy' for improving instruction," and without a demand for proof of improvement. So concludes an outside audit. Surprisingly, the city's teacher union doesn't dispute the findings, though it sought to place part of the blame for the training's "vague results" on the fact that it "was done to [the teachers], rather than with them or for them." The audit nonetheless suggests that more resources poured into professional development is no sure path to improved teacher effectiveness. "Schools get millions; results 'unclear'," by Rosalind Rossi, Chicago Sun-Times, November 15, 2002

Four exemplary charter schools in Arizona and North Carolina have been granted national accreditation as part of a pilot program by the American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE). Widely respected as an accreditor of liberal arts colleges, the Washington, DC-based AALE sought K-12 charter schools that demonstrate educational and administrative excellence, including a content-rich curriculum, effective use of assessments, innovative teacher recruitment and promotion practices, strong leadership and financial stability. For more information, see http://www.aale.org/charters/4_new_schools.htm. For a broader look at a related issue - the importance of a rigorous, but not excessively bureaucratic, system of charter school authorization - see "New scrutiny for sponsors of charters," by Caroline Hendrie, Education Week, November 20, 2002

The Jacksonville Times offers a depressing look inside Andrew Jackson High School, one of 64 failing Florida schools, revealing a "battle zone of academic frustration" and blame that's unlikely to change anytime soon. A lengthy article explains how teachers, many of them resentful or wary of the FCAT exam and of legislators' relentless demands for change, cope with passive, preoccupied and troubled students and reticent or combative parents. On the left coast, by contrast, a high school once written off as hopeless has undergone a remarkable transformation under the no-nonsense leadership of a new principal. To the disbelief of state auditors, in less than a year a formerly chaotic and unruly campus has evolved into an educational institution with orderly halls, effective teaching techniques, and weekend sessions for teachers to develop new curricula aligned with state standards. "Inside an F school: frustration, angst," by Laura Diamond, Jacksonville Times, November 17, 2002, and "State praises turnaround at school," by Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2002

Achieve, Inc.
November 2002

Achieve, Inc., the CEO-and-governor led standards-based reform organization, recently issued this 25-page account of reform progress by three of its favorite states (all of which had invited Achieve to review their work in this area.) The conclusion: after a decade or more of effort, standards-based reform is showing good results in all three but they're going about it very differently. "While the states used the same three-part strategy [standards, testing, accountability], the tactics they chose varied a great deal. Each state faced a unique set of circumstances and made different choices along the way. The different paths&suggest that there is more than one way to achieve high standards." For example, Massachusetts has focused entirely on "student stakes" while Maryland laid the accountability burden on schools, and Texas did both. Other differences are interesting, too, as is the ubiquity in all three states of "consistency, consensus and comprehensiveness." This report is a little on the boosterish side, perhaps not giving quite enough ink to stumbles and obstacles that these states encountered along the path, but, then, it was meant to encourage other states. One can only hope that NCLB's valiant effort to standardize many aspects of states' approach to standards-based reform will still permit this kind of constructive variation in more places. See for yourself at http://www.achieve.org/dstore.nsf/Lookup/reportthree-statefinal/$file/reportthree-statefinal.pdf.

California State Auditor
November 2002

The California State Auditor released this examination of four districts that have chartered a larger number of schools, concluding that they're not doing a very good job of it - and may be garnering more state funds than they should to compensate themselves for their weak oversight. The districts (Fresno, Oakland, San Diego, Los Angeles) say it isn't so - and fill more than half of this 216-page report in explaining themselves. With some 436 California charter schools now enrolling upwards of 160,000 pupils, this is a big subject. Charter advocates regard the Auditor's report as a hatchet job, part of the intensifying political campaign to curb these schools' freedoms and restrict their numbers. At the same time, they acknowledge that the California charter-school accountability picture is less than perfect. This has led their statewide association to propose having schools accredited (by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges) and to require added fiscal accountability. State board chairman Reed Hastings suggests that no school should get its charter renewed unless it scores at least a 4 on the state's ten-point Academic Performance Index. (Critics of THAT idea say a "value added" or "progress" measure should be used rather than a fixed standard.) While the Auditor's recommendations for districts (and the State Department of Education) strike me as plausible, the risk, as always in these discussions, is that stepped-up "oversight" by charter authorizers will turn into clumsy over-regulation. Whether that results from mischievousness by charter foes or the innocent inability of bureaucracy-bound authorizers to imagine any other way to live up to their responsibilities, the result could be devastating. But it's not a good thing for schools with bad fiscal practices and woeful educational results to continue unchanged, whether they're charters, traditional public schools or private schools. Someone needs to blow the whistle. The challenge is to find ways to do that without sliding into a mass of red tape. You can find this report online at http://www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/pdfs/2002104.pdf.

Richard L. Allington
2002

A recent Gadfly editorial suggesting there may be too much heavy-handed education legislation on the books [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=34#482] led to a note from Richard L. Allington, the "author/editor" of this new book. Allington is a professor of education at the University of Florida, a member of the "Reading Hall of Fame," and a very unhappy camper when it comes to the National Reading Panel (NRP) and other efforts to describe the "scientific consensus" about how children learn (and should be taught) to read. His new book ends with a stern warning against a "national reading methodology." Most of it consists of authors disputing the NRP's findings and the federal legislation and policies that rest upon those findings - notably NCLB's "Reading First" program. Along the way, the authors go after phonics, testing, accountability, privatization and other demons. Good try, Professor Allington, but I'm unpersuaded. There are many parts of K-12 education where I'm all for flexibility and variety and experimentation, but early reading is one of the few places in education that boasts solid science, and we should honor it. Congress did NOT say everyone must teach phonics. It merely said that federal (reading) dollars will henceforth hinge on it. Nobody needs to take those dollars - and many private schools and home schoolers can't or won't. But just as I wouldn't want Medicaid dollars to pay for leeches and mustard plasters, or NASA dollars to pay for rubber-band-powered planes, I don't believe Education Department monies meant to advance the teaching of reading should support non-scientific approaches. Judging from the number of states that are having to rewrite their Reading First applications - the first round having been rejected for insufficient attention to the scientific consensus-this is proving to be a bitter pill for many educators and bureaucracies. Let them eschew the money, then. But the numerous authors gathered into this 300-page volume fail to disprove that consensus, which in fact did not start with the NRP but at least 35 years ago when the late Jeanne Chall first published Learning to Read: the Great Debate. If you'd like to have a look at this effort to rebut it, the ISBN is 0325005133. The publisher is Heinemann. And you can get further information (provided that someone once taught you to read!) by surfing to http://www.heinemann.com/shared/products/E00513.asp.

Stig Leschly, Harvard Business School
October 29, 2002

What would happen if training programs for principals focused less on complying with certification rules and more on developing the practical leadership skills that they'll need to be successful in their schools? What if school leaders were recruited from many backgrounds rather than just from the ranks of classroom teachers? Harvard Business School professor Stig Leschly shows what these ideas look like in practice in a case study of New Leaders for New Schools, a promising effort to improve U.S. public education by transforming its approach to school leadership. The brainchild of three quondam graduate students with a passion for helping needy children, New Leaders believes in strengthening education by raising the quality of those who run schools. Begun in 2001, it accepts a small number of top-notch fellows (culled from the business, civic and education sectors) to participate in an intensive summer institute that stresses two themes: 1) becoming a successful instructional leader, and 2) becoming a general manager capable of defining and sustaining a mission-driven organization. After completing the summer program, fellows enter a 10-month, in-school residency during which they are mentored by effective principals. New Leaders has thrived during its first two years and now faces some tough decisions about how to grow without forfeiting quality. Those interested in school leadership and/or the intersection of business theory with education will want to learn more about this project, both as education reform initiative and as entrepreneurial start-up. Copies of this case study - which includes some revealing insights from the program's founders - may be ordered for $6.50 from http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=803073.

UNESCO
2002

This new report from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reviews international readiness to attain the target of "education for all" that was set at a Dakar forum in 2000. That meeting produced a "framework" of six extremely ambitious goals for all the planet's countries to attain by 2015 (e.g. "comprehensive early childhood care and education," universal primary education "of good quality," a 50% gain in adult literacy, "especially for women"). This report doesn't actually report on progress since Dakar because 1999 or 2000 is the most recent available data for most of the indicators. Rather, it seeks (in 193 pages) to appraise the prospects of reaching those goals. The sobering if unsurprising bottom line: there's a big gap between the 83 countries (mostly wealthy) that are "on track" and the other 70 (nearly all poor) that aren't. (Some of the latter are actually regressing.) The reasons are numerous, often having to do with macro-political developments, war, and the general economic circumstances in which countries find themselves. One widespread education problem, however, is a big teacher shortage, with an estimated three million more instructors needed in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Like most UNESCO reports, this one calls for lots more foreign aid while staying pretty much "inside the box" in terms of education delivery systems. You will not, for example, find much here about the potential of low-cost private schools such as James Tooley has found in third-world countries [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=36#520], nor anything about how distance learning might jump right over the infrastructure problems associated with building and staffing thousands of rural and village schools. Particularly with the United States rejoining UNESCO, however, readers will want to reacquaint themselves with that organization's work in education, some of which is valuable - especially on the statistics front - but much of which is unimaginative. Download this report at http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/monitoring/monitoring_2002.shtml.