The Education Gadfly Weekly

Eric A. Hanushek and Margaret E. Raymond, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 24, No. 2
2005

This short, dense article by famed education data gurus Hanushek and Raymond answers the question posed in the title with a "yes": in NAEP scores, they find a "3.5-point gain that came with accountability," a statistically significant amount. As they take pains to show, such analysis is tricky. Accountability systems are imposed statewide, leaving no "control" schools from which to draw comparisons within states. And as in all education analyses, demographics, spending, and any number of other policies muddy the waters - how can one be sure that accountability, not some other factor, led to improved student performance? They acknowledge these challenges and then do a satisfactory job of working through them. For example, they show few discernable differences between early-adopter states and those that implemented their accountability systems more recently - to ease the concern that some other phenomena might have led to both the creation of the accountability systems and the test gains themselves. They then break down the results by race and, disappointingly, find the least gains among black students, with more progress for whites and the most for Hispanics. And they go further. They suggest that introducing accountability systems is associated with only a very slight increase in the number of kids classified as special ed. They also correlate their results with the various Fordham, Education Week, and Carnoy/Loeb ratings of accountability systems to show that stronger systems generally predict larger achievement gains (though "these findings should be treated with caution," given that judgments help drive the ratings and the three methods produce very different grades). They even dig into the nature of accountability systems themselves and find that school "report cards," which inform but don't reward or punish, have little effect. It's a challenging but rewarding article and you can find it here.

Nancy Hoffman, Jobs for the Future
April 2005
 
Remaking Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century: What Role for High School Programs?
Richard Kazis, Jobs for the Future
April 2005

These latest installments of the JFF "Double the Numbers" series are worth a look for hardy high school reformers. The first examines programs in Florida, Utah, and New York that allow students to dip their toes into postsecondary education while finishing their high school studies. There's plenty of detail here for policymakers considering their own dual enrollment programs - as well as a frank discussion of the thorny issues to be resolved. Most notably: who pays the bills for such an approach? The second piece is a collection of essays about "Career and Technical Education," formerly known as voc-ed. Those in the field are clearly skittish about the President's proposal to eliminate the entire Perkins voc-tech program (which has as much chance of passing Congress as the Kyoto Treaty). Yet it's hard to find many compelling reasons within these pages to keep it alive. Elliot Medrich of MPR says it best: CTE must "change or die." The reports are available online here and here.

Joyce E. King, editor, Educational Research Association???s Commission on Research in Black Education, 2005

This 440-pager may leave you puzzled and frustrated. Six years in the making, it comes to no coherent conclusions and the twenty essays in this volume follow their own trajectories, some of them interesting and worthwhile (e.g. Linda Darling-Hammond on U.S. school reform and black students), some so esoteric and fantastical as to leave this reader cold. Much of it is lofty, jargon-riddled, and theoretical. Much is about black people in Africa and other lands. Much shares in the dual hazards of post-modernism and Afro-centrism. I cannot recommend it but you might want to know about it. Learn more here.

We're not sure whether to cheer or jeer. As the Wall Street Journal's June Kronholz reports, the tutoring industry is setting its sights on the Barney set. Sylvan expects to enroll four-year-olds in each of its learning centers by winter; Kaplan's SCORE! centers already teach over 15,000 children from ages four to six. It's a growth industry, but is it a good idea? On the one hand, it's heartening to see parents ignore the dubious advice of take-it-slow child development experts like David Elkind of Tufts who suggests that "parents and teachers wait until a child is six or seven before reading lessons." Six or seven? Gadfly was reading War and Peace by then. On the other hand, this is one more indication of the out-of-control anxiety of middle-class parents, not to mention the "we'll do anything for money" stance of the tutoring firms. If only low-income kids could have access to this kind of help. Now that No Child Left Behind's "supplemental services" provision is starting to show promise, how about transforming Head Start into a mini-voucher for poor pre-K kids? No doubt the tutoring companies would be glad to have the business.

"Preschoolers' prep," by June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2005 (subscription required)

We hear it again and again: Americans aren't learning the skills they need to compete in the 21st century. How to prove this theory? Well, follow the money, or in this case, the yen. Toyota, after months of speculation over the destination of its new plant, this week opted for Ontario, reportedly turning down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from several American states. One reason: retraining U.S. workers is just too burdensome and costly. (Nissan and Honda factories have reportedly encountered workers in Mississippi and Alabama who need pictorials to operate complicated machinery.) This is depressing stuff indeed. That hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies still can't entice a company to locate in the biggest, most lucrative market in the world should serve as a wake-up-call to the citizens of the rejected states.

"Toyota to build 100,000 vehicles per year in Woodstock, Ont., starting 2008," by Steve Erwin, CBC News, July 12, 2005

In this month's American School Board Journal, Susan Black describes her tenure as director of curriculum and instruction for a Midwestern city school district. Like a French Revolutionary lopping off the heads of the ancien regime, once appointed she decides to root out competition in schools, especially such inhumane exercises as poster and essay contests, charity pledge drives, and other horrors. She even witnessed one first-grade teacher give a child a star for scissoring straight and was horrified that the school's principal didn't intervene. Surveying this scene of psychic disaster and emotional carnage, she "knew it was time to put on the brakes," since we all know that competition "seldom leads to meaningful learning" and "dulls the spirits" of kids. And what evidence did she cite? What else but the goofball works of old progressive, anti-testing warhorses like Alfie Kohn and Marvin Marshall! Under their tutelage, Black calls for positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, social skills, and group processing. Have we heard this before? Old habits die hard, but nothing dies harder than worn-out education fads.

"And the winner is," by Susan Black, American School Board Journal, July 2005

Several years ago, the Florida Legislature created a mandatory merit pay policy for public school systems statewide. At the time, the legislature (naively) allowed districts to set their own eligibility requirements. The St. Petersburg Times reports that "many districts, pressured by teachers unions, developed voluntary plans with so many hurdles that few teachers applied." No shock there, merely more proof of the challenge of instituting reforms from the state level when the unions and other interests pull the districts' strings. Now, Florida's vigorous Education Commissioner John Winn is setting new ground rules to crack down on districts that thwart the spirit of the law. And, again - surprise! - the teacher unions are caterwauling. Florida Education Association spokesman Mark Pudlow questioned the rule change: "You say you have to give more money to teachers who are outstanding, and if you don't, they'll take money away from you? This is a theater of the absurd." More absurd? Whining about low teacher salaries while preventing great teachers from making more.

"State forcing teacher bonuses," Ron Matus, St. Petersburg Times, July 6, 2005

Despite all the talk about improving inner-city schools, the greatest promise of the No Child Left Behind Act was always in America's leafy suburbs. Unfortunately, that promise is in danger of being squandered.

Because suburban schools are the most likely to post high average test scores that mask large gulfs between students of different races or classes, the law's central premise - that schools be held accountable for the success of all students, be they white, black, Hispanic, low-income or with special needs - should have the greatest impact in them. The law made those achievement gaps transparent and put pressure on every school to focus on the children most in need, even if they represented a small part of the student population.

This suburban phenomenon posed a political challenge to President Bush from the very beginning. Affluent parents and homeowners in the suburbs - the Republican base - were not pleased to hear that many of their beloved local schools were "in need of improvement." This unease translated into outrage from Republican legislators around the country, most audibly in Utah, where the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a bill ordering the state to ignore key sections of the federal law.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the administration would have to bend to political reality. Now Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has offered states a string of exceptions and flexible arrangements that make it less likely that suburban schools will feel the heat of No Child Left Behind's spotlight.

What's wrong with giving suburban schools a break? After all, isn't the real crisis in American education in the inner cities? Not so fast. Nationwide, the average African-American 12th-grader reads and does math at the level of the average white eighth-grader - this even though one-third of African-American children and almost half of Hispanic children reside in suburbs, according to the 2000 census. These students, though learning more than their inner-city counterparts, are still performing much worse than their white and Asian peers.

No Child Left Behind was perfectly suited for the situation. Its primary mechanisms are sunshine and shame: gathering statistics and alerting the community when a school is not doing right by all of its students.

In urban districts, this shaming appears to have had little traction. City leaders are conditioned to hearing that their schools are low performing; poor urban parents have little power to do anything about it; and teachers' unions use their political clout to maintain the dismal status quo.

But in the suburbs, bad news about local schools captures the quick attention of politicians (and residents worried about their property values). These districts report to powerful parents who have the money to move to another town or send their children to private schools. Given the right incentives, suburban districts can achieve solid gains.

Look at Montgomery County in Maryland, just outside Washington. It has a rapidly growing population of low-income, minority and immigrant students. Diversity is increasingly the norm. Unfortunately, so is a yawning achievement gap, as was made transparent in the first year under No Child Left Behind, when one in five elementary schools in Montgomery County failed to make "adequate yearly progress."

So the district intensified programs in which extra money was given to schools with at-risk students; struggling children were given additional help; good teachers were lured to the areas where they were needed most. The result? This year reading scores were up 7.8 percentage points for African-American fourth-graders and 10.7 percentage points for Hispanics.

Or consider Chapel Hill, N.C., a community accustomed to having the best schools in the state. When state and then federal figures showed a big achievement gap, that spurred the community into action. The district now holds an annual meeting on equity and excellence, and it joined a network of suburban districts dedicated to raising minority achievement. The results are astounding: 80 percent of African-American students were proficient in both reading and math in 2003, as opposed to fewer than half a decade ago.

Of course, in a world of limited resources, efforts to help disadvantaged students might mean that affluent students might get less attention or lose their favorite teachers. A renewed focus on reading and math might cut into time for the arts. These trade-offs can become an explosive situation for a school board or a superintendent and some have had their states petitioned Washington for relief.

Unfortunately, Secretary Spellings has given in to their concerns. Exhibit A is Gov. Jeb Bush's Florida, where a whopping 77 percent of schools last year were deemed lacking under federal criteria. To be fair, Florida's schools are probably no worse than those in other states; the high percentage of low-performing schools reflected Florida's ambitious expectations under No Child Left Behind. Perhaps some tweaking was in order.

But Florida requested that the Education Department not hold its schools accountable for the achievement of subgroups that make up less than 15 percent of a school's population or that include fewer than 100 pupils. Federal officials assented.

Now a suburban, predominantly white middle school with 800 students will not be held accountable for the performance of its 90 African-American students, its 80 Hispanic students, or its 70 special-needs students, except as they affect its average scores. In other words, the system will go back to the way it used to be, when these children were basically invisible.

Secretary Spellings does not have an enviable job in keeping the bipartisan school-reform coalition together. Perhaps lessening the pressure on affluent suburban schools is an easy win. But at what cost? President Bush has often decried the "soft bigotry of low expectations." He didn't make an exception for the suburbs then, and we shouldn't start now.

This article originally appeared in the July 11, 2005 edition of the New York Times.

It won't do to be churlish about today's NAEP long-term trend results. But neither should we be gaga. Here are Gadfly's first reflections, with more to come in later editions.

• American kids aren't doing very well but they're doing better than before, at least at ages 9 and 13, at least in math (and some of them in reading). Most of the gains are with younger students and with minority students, and mostly at the low end. (Even at age 9, there was no statistically significant gain in reading at the 90th percentile.)
  
• There's good news in places. Nine-year-olds are posting the best scores ever.  Reading and math scores for nine-year-old African Americans and math scores for black thirteen-year-olds are at an all-time high, while the reading achievement gap for nine-year-olds is narrower. These are heartening data.
  
• Reading remains a problem, though, especially at the middle- and high-school levels, where performance flattens and even drops off. Most likely, accountability and higher standards are having an effect at the lower grades, but that momentum is not being sustained. (We have a few ideas as to why; watch for upcoming Fordham report on the problems of middle schools.)
  
• Seventeen year old achievement remains a big problem, with modest declines posted in both reading and math. Though it's never clear that they take NAEP tests seriously, it's hard to think they were less serious in 2004 than previously. The likely story is that efforts to beef up the American high school have thus far borne no fruit.
  
• The percentage of kids whose parents had only (or less than) a high school diploma plummeted from 45 percent to 33 percent from 1971 to 2004, a drop of 27 percent. (See appendix B3 for the details.) Yet we didn't see tremendous gains in achievement over that time, despite parents presumably becoming more, not less, educated and more interested in education for their children. This may raise some questions about whether a better-educated (or at least more highly degreed) society naturally begets better-educated kids.  
  
• What accounts for the good news among the younger kids? Success has a thousand fathers and many will try to claim credit. We're inclined to thank the general toning up of standards since 1983 (A Nation at Risk), 1989 (the Charlottesville "summit"), 1994 (Goals 2000) and 2001 (NCLB), all of which played out differently in various states but all of which catalyzed overdue changes in many places.

Big problems remain, however: unacceptably wide achievement gaps, low achievement across the board, disheartening numbers of kids who just aren't up to snuff. Yes, things are better than they were. But this is no time for anybody to declare victory or get complacent. So savor the moment. And keep on fighting. You can read the results for yourself here.

"9-year-olds said better in math, reading," by Darlene Superville, Associated Press, July 14, 2005

Eric A. Hanushek and Margaret E. Raymond, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 24, No. 2
2005

This short, dense article by famed education data gurus Hanushek and Raymond answers the question posed in the title with a "yes": in NAEP scores, they find a "3.5-point gain that came with accountability," a statistically significant amount. As they take pains to show, such analysis is tricky. Accountability systems are imposed statewide, leaving no "control" schools from which to draw comparisons within states. And as in all education analyses, demographics, spending, and any number of other policies muddy the waters - how can one be sure that accountability, not some other factor, led to improved student performance? They acknowledge these challenges and then do a satisfactory job of working through them. For example, they show few discernable differences between early-adopter states and those that implemented their accountability systems more recently - to ease the concern that some other phenomena might have led to both the creation of the accountability systems and the test gains themselves. They then break down the results by race and, disappointingly, find the least gains among black students, with more progress for whites and the most for Hispanics. And they go further. They suggest that introducing accountability systems is associated with only a very slight increase in the number of kids classified as special ed. They also correlate their results with the various Fordham, Education Week, and Carnoy/Loeb ratings of accountability systems to show that stronger systems generally predict larger achievement gains (though "these findings should be treated with caution," given that judgments help drive the ratings and the three methods produce very different grades). They even dig into the nature of accountability systems themselves and find that school "report cards," which inform but don't reward or punish, have little effect. It's a challenging but rewarding article and you can find it here.

Joyce E. King, editor, Educational Research Association???s Commission on Research in Black Education, 2005

This 440-pager may leave you puzzled and frustrated. Six years in the making, it comes to no coherent conclusions and the twenty essays in this volume follow their own trajectories, some of them interesting and worthwhile (e.g. Linda Darling-Hammond on U.S. school reform and black students), some so esoteric and fantastical as to leave this reader cold. Much of it is lofty, jargon-riddled, and theoretical. Much is about black people in Africa and other lands. Much shares in the dual hazards of post-modernism and Afro-centrism. I cannot recommend it but you might want to know about it. Learn more here.

Nancy Hoffman, Jobs for the Future
April 2005
 
Remaking Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century: What Role for High School Programs?
Richard Kazis, Jobs for the Future
April 2005

These latest installments of the JFF "Double the Numbers" series are worth a look for hardy high school reformers. The first examines programs in Florida, Utah, and New York that allow students to dip their toes into postsecondary education while finishing their high school studies. There's plenty of detail here for policymakers considering their own dual enrollment programs - as well as a frank discussion of the thorny issues to be resolved. Most notably: who pays the bills for such an approach? The second piece is a collection of essays about "Career and Technical Education," formerly known as voc-ed. Those in the field are clearly skittish about the President's proposal to eliminate the entire Perkins voc-tech program (which has as much chance of passing Congress as the Kyoto Treaty). Yet it's hard to find many compelling reasons within these pages to keep it alive. Elliot Medrich of MPR says it best: CTE must "change or die." The reports are available online here and here.