The Education Gadfly Weekly

Kevin Donnelly, Education Forum
October 2002

New Zealand's Education Forum recently commissioned Australian education expert Kevin Donnelly to review the smaller country's national curriculum. He has delivered a scathing critique of it and of the New Zealand government's current effort to "stocktake" it. His criticisms center on five concerns: (1) the curriculum's continued reliance on an "outcomes-based approach&that&has been largely abandoned by equivalent education systems such as those in Australia and the United States"; (2) New Zealand's failure to recognize the "superiority of either a 'syllabus' or 'standards' approach to curriculum development utilized by successful education systems such as Singapore, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and South Korea"; (3) uncritical and excessive use of "a process-based approach to curriculum that fails to recognize properly the central importance of educational content"; (4) undue emphasis on "a student-centered view of learning to the detriment of&.the 'structure of the discipline'"; and (5) the government's failure to undertake a proper international comparative analysis of its curriculum. U.S. and other education reformers, particularly in places that are re-examining their own standards and curricula, may find this interesting and helpful as, of course, will aficionados of Kiwi education issues. You can find it on the web at http://www.educationforum.org.nz/documents/publications/review_school_curriculum.pdf.

U.S. Department of Education
September 2002

In reauthorizing the Perkins (voc ed) Act in 1998, Congress called for an independent panel to conduct a National Assessment of Vocational Education (NAVE). This is the 22-member panel's first report to Congress, published by the U.S. Department of Education and intended to help guide next year's Perkins reauthorization cycle. This "interim" report has limited value, as the panel says its advice on the tough issues awaits the final NAVE report, which may or may not get published by year's end. But lots of information about voc ed is provided in this hundred-page tome and some of it is surprising: most interesting to me, while the total number of credits earned by high-school students has risen (from an average 21.6 in 1982 to 25.2 in 1998), and while essentially all growth has taken place in "academic" courses, still the average number of vocational course credits on student transcripts has barely changed: from 4.7 to 4.0, with that modest decline halting in 1992. It remains true, however, that students who take more voc ed classes also tend to take fewer, easier, academic courses. Also interesting: by this group's calculations, one-third of post-secondary undergraduates, "are considered to be in vocational programs." There's more. It's clear that voc ed needs attention and that it will be a real challenge for Perkins reauthorizers to chart a new course for it. Today, it's something of a policy orphan, remote from the main strand of K-12 reform (which is unabashedly academic) and fitting uncomfortably into the issues associated with higher education. It will be interesting to see what this panel recommends. For that, however, you'll have to await their next report. To download this one, go to http://www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/NAVE/reports.html.

General Accounting Office
October 29, 2002

Simultaneously disappointing critics of for-profit education and deflating education management organizations' (EMOs) claims of remarkable student progress, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has determined that no conclusions can be drawn about the academic performance, parental satisfaction, parental involvement or school climate in charter schools managed by EMOs. Reviewing research on three for-profit EMOs - Edison Schools, Mosaica Education and Chancellor Beacon Academies - the GAO noted that all but one study suffered from methodological problems, such as lack of a proper comparison group, incomplete data, or failure to study results over a sufficient period of time. (The lone methodologically sound study showed no significant difference between student performance at an Edison school in Florida and comparable public schools.) Despite its unsatisfying "conclusion," this report is useful for its summary of the EMOs' programs and curricula. It also highlights several critical points about EMO-managed charters and charter schools in general: more such schools are needed; those that exist must be given time to demonstrate their successes (or failures); and all schools must release data and be open to evaluation. Only then can we have an informed debate about the benefits of school choice and the role of profit-making firms in education. The report (GAO-03-11) is available online at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0311.pdf.

Andrew LeFevre and Rea Hederman, American Legislative Exchange Council
October 2002

This is the latest in a series of state-level "report cards" from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Weighing in at 133 pages, it would have benefited from closer copyediting and more sophisticated statistical expertise, but it contains a wealth of useful data as well as an overall ranking of the fifty states according to their academic performance. The latter is based on a complex amalgam of SAT, ACT and NAEP results. While the authors acknowledge the limits of college-entrance exam score averages for purposes of rating states, they do it anyway. Each state gets a one-page summary report card. The chapters that follow deal with education inputs, outcomes and several ambitious efforts to find correlations between them. The authors work a bit too hard to show that more resources don't translate into stronger results, but they also deliver much handy data and some interesting analyses. You can buy a hard copy for $25 or download the whole thing by surfing to http://www.alec.org/meSWFiles/pdf/Education_Report_card.pdf.

Elizabeth Foster and Anne Simmons, Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.
October 2002

A new report by Massachusetts-based Recruiting New Teachers, Inc. (RNT) identifies America's 1100 community colleges as an untapped resource for attracting and training educators and helping to alleviate teacher shortages. The authors deem community colleges - where over a fifth of public school teachers begin their education - an insufficiently appreciated solution for a host of logical (and mostly obvious) reasons. For example, they typically enroll large numbers of local, minority students who may be better able to identify with urban kids and who are more likely to remain in their community to teach. The bulk of the report consists of observations about community-college teacher training programs and the students who enroll in them, with a few pages given over to profiles of exemplary programs. But RNT's vision of the community college's role - as feeder of would-be teachers to four-year colleges via "interinstitutional collaborations" - is too cramped. It neglects a far more interesting role for community colleges that could really revolutionize the teacher preparation process: as purveyors of fast, focused training in teaching fundamentals to college-educated people seeking alternative certification. This report is not available online, but hard copies can be ordered for $24.95 plus shipping and handling by calling 617-489-6000, emailing [email protected] or visiting http://www.recruitingteachers.org/news/2002TappingPotential.html.

Election post-mortems typically take three forms: congratulations to the winner for their success and efforts to understand what caused it; soul-searching among the losers; and prognostications by pundits about the legislative and policy agendas that await the new Congress, reconfigured state legislatures, governors, etc. In education as in a hundred other policy domains, expect a blizzard of forecasts about which bills and proposals can get enacted at municipal, state and federal levels in light of the political lineups that changed on Tuesday.

Before that blizzard engulfs us, however, please pause and take a deep breath. Consider the possibility that we already have too much state and federal education legislation and most of it isn't working. Consider the fate of a nation where lawmakers issue orders but nothing actually changes, where elaborate statutes set lofty goals that in reality few will attain. In such a nation, what is gained by more legislating?

The world abounds in countries where people ignore their governments and go about their business with scant regard for the law. Some are scary lands of violence, chaos and misery. Others are lovely places - Italy comes to mind - where people behave decently, lead good lives and raise their families in reasonable comfort and safety, but where innumerable government laws and rules are honored in the breach. Much of the economy is underground. Permits depend on whom you know. Enforcement of everything is spotty and unpredictable. Taxes get paid sometimes. Regulations get winked at.

The United States celebrates the rule of law and, overall, we've done a decent job of living by it. There are troublesome exceptions (drug abuse, tax compliance, speed limits) but we're generally a law-abiding lot, capable of outrage when someone - a lone sniper, a giant corporation - breaks the rules. Our respect for laws, however, is linked to not having too many of them and not letting them intrude too deeply into our lives and institutions. It's one thing to deter people from harming or gypping others and to provide for the common defense. It's a very different matter when lawmakers seek to change our behavior, tell us what to aspire to, dictate where we live, how we raise our children or run our schools.

In recent decades, primary-secondary education has come to illustrate government's proclivity to overreach. States now tell teachers what to teach. Large bureaucracies control whom principals may hire for their classrooms, what to pay them and whether they can be fired. Other government units decree the training that colleges must supply to future teachers and the textbooks to be used in 5th grade. Congress enacts thousand-page statutes that spell out in detail the procedures a school must use to meet the needs of a disabled child, the ways a state must track pupil achievement and the interventions that a district has to make when its schools falter.

The intentions are laudable. Americans aren't satisfied with the academic achievement of our children. As a result, state and federal governments have sought to take action to solve the problem. So laws proliferate, regulations multiply, red tape coils and bureaucracies bulge. Referenda multiply, too, seeking through "direct democracy" to achieve complex policy ends that legislators can't or won't embrace. (Tuesday evening, as Jeb Bush was getting re-elected to the Florida statehouse, that state's voters also approved constitutional amendments to reduce class size and establish universal pre-school. Bay State voters sought to undo bilingual education.)

There's just one problem: little of it is working. Not many schools meet state academic standards (and the others seem to linger forever on the "failure" list.) National education goals don't get attained. When too few "certified" teachers are available, schools hire anyone they can. Local districts disregard statutes admonishing them to end "social promotion" and go right on advancing kids who fall short of the state's standards. (This has been an acute problem in Florida.) Even compulsory attendance laws are scorned, as witness our millions of dropouts and the many schools whose attendance is far below their enrollments. (15,000 youngsters cut school in Philadelphia on an average day.) State law says that parents whose children don't come to class are guilty of a misdemeanor. Yet nothing happens.

Most states still have not complied with the big 1994 federal ESEA revision, much less the dictates of last year's "No Child Left Behind" act. Rather than organizing themselves to attain the ambitious academic goals that the new law mandates, several states have already eased their standards. They're working on ways to foil the rule that says every child must have a "highly qualified" teacher. And the new federal mandate - supposedly in effect right now - that districts must provide choices for youngsters stuck in "failing" schools has been widely ignored.

What happens to a country where government passes ambitious, complex, far-reaching laws and referenda but nothing changes? First we see a lot of jawboning and finger pointing. Then, at least in education, after five or eight years they pass another law, ostensibly fixing the errors of the last one. Yet again little changes. Money gets spent, sure. Rules get made. Forms get filled out. Bureaucrats keep busy. But not much happens on the ground. Few kids learn more. They don't even attend more. And teachers and principals gradually adopt the attitude that "This, too, shall pass. Wait a bit and they'll try something else. They'll change the plan again." In other words, we lose respect for the law itself.

There are rare, partial exceptions. The 1954 Brown decision eventually ended de jure segregation in the public schools, although this took many years, a relentless judiciary and the deployment of troops and marshals. The 1975 law saying that handicapped youngsters must get a "free, appropriate public education" has also gained traction, though at enormous cost in dollars and red tape. Neither of those measures, however, led to satisfactory achievement, either for minority youngsters or for many with disabilities. It turns out to be far easier to comply with the formal requirements of a law than with its spirit.

As the election post mortems festoon themselves across your computer screen and clutter your inbox, therefore, as governors and presidents prepare their "state of the state" and "state of the union" addresses, as changed legislatures and reconfigured Congressional committees work out their agendas for next year, and as pundits beyond counting predict what bills will pass and which policies may finally be adopted, consider the possibility that less is more. That we don't need a lot more legislating, at least not the kind that fruitlessly seeks to alter our behavior or put government in charge of improving us. We should covet Italy's food, its art and its music, but not its amused contempt for laws and lawmakers. If we had fewer laws, perhaps we'd be more apt to heed them. In education, for starters, we might try lightening up some heavy-handed statutes and liberating educators and parents to make more of their own decisions.

Few of America's thousands of middle schools are engaged in the "focused, demanding work necessary to serve all their students well," says veteran middle school analyst Hayes Mizell of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. Too many middle schools believe that learning ceases when hormones rage, and too many focus disproportionately on only a few of adolescents' needs at the expense of rigorous academics. Speaking before a group of civic organizations in New York, Mizell explained "What Parents Need to Know About Middle School Reform" (October 16, 2002). For more on Mizell's middle school musings, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=50#1378.

Watched by an oversight board and chief operating officer more powerful than the mayor, hundreds of millions of state tax dollars stand to flow through Camden, New Jersey - a city so forlorn that the drug trade may be its single largest employer - as part of a massive recovery plan and a state supreme court decision equalizing public-school funding. Yet the COO - installed to oversee the recovery and crack down on corruption - has no authority over the city's dysfunctional school system and must depend on a patronage-loving school board to implement a school construction plan. For a sobering look at the messy details of urban school reform amidst civic degeneration, see "The Front Lines of School Reform: Sending Aid to a Corrupt Culture," by Brent Staples, The New York Times, November 3, 2002

As their tuitions escalate, public colleges and universities are experimenting with formulas and incentives to attract strong students. For nearly a decade, Georgia has granted free tuition to high school graduates with a B or better average - regardless of financial need - to stop the brain drain of top students who left the state for college and never returned. These merit scholarships have boosted the number of smart kids in the state's universities but, because some of them don't "need" the aid they're getting, it has also left low-income students competing for a smaller share of state dollars. So say the critics, anyway. By contrast, Texas' "10 percent law" - which guarantees admission to the state's university system to the top ten percent of graduates of every Texas high school - sends a steady stream of African American and Hispanic students to public campuses while squeezing out many other strong (disproportionately white) students who attend competitive middle-class and suburban high schools. See "B's, Not Need, Are Enough for Some State Scholarships," by Greg Winter, The New York Times, October 31, 2002; and "Texas Colleges' Diversity Plan May Be New Model," by Lee Hockstader, The Washington Post, November 4, 2002

Writing for American Outlook, Checker Finn examines the potential for chaos and fraud inherent in the fast-growing market of virtual higher education, aka distance learning-which has evolved from its Pony Express origins into wildly varying offerings by universities, non-profits and for-profits far and wide. It's easier and sleazier than ever to earn a degree online, writes Finn, especially since many virtual "universities" award credit and diplomas for life experience, not for course-based study and content mastery. What's worse, because accreditation is voluntary and largely unmonitored, it can be difficult to distinguish the legitimate education institutions from the snake oil vendors. See "Fool U.," by Chester E. Finn, Jr., American Outlook, Fall 2002 (subscribers only).

The handwriting is on the wall for ed schools, writes UNC-Wilmington education professor Martin Kozloff in a hard-hitting summary of criticisms leveled at them. Kozloff explains reformers' attack on ed schools' validity, reliability, credibility and monopoly (not to mention dubious theories). Have a look at Kozloff's paper. You may even find yourself mentioned. "Ed Schools in Crisis," paper given at a conference sponsored by the John Locke Foundation, October 26, 2002

The winning candidates and ballot initiatives in Tuesday's election reflected voters' conflicting priorities and education philosophies, and reveal a nearly evenly divided electorate. Florida voters returned Jeb Bush to the governor's office by a healthy margin, but also approved Democratic challenger Bill McBride's pet initiative to limit class sizes statewide. Bilingual education was banned in a landslide vote in Massachusetts, but upheld by a slimmer margin in Colorado. And in California, voters gave a thumbs up to actor Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposition 49 - which earmarks over half a billion dollars for after-school programs - and a $13 billion school construction bond, the largest statewide bond in American history. A major construction bond issue passed in Dayton, Ohio, too.

"Voters approve smaller classes, free preschool," by Lori Hovitz and Scott Powers, Orlando Sentinel, November 6, 2002

"English immersion plan wins over bilingual ed," by Anand Vaishnav, The Boston Globe, November 6, 2002

"Bilingual ban fails," by Eric Hubler, Denver Post, November 6, 2002

"After-school enrichment plan Ok'd, Measure to designate $550 million for activities starting in '04," by Suzanne Herel, San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 2002

"Easy win for school construction bond, Measure to reduce crowding and fix aging classrooms," by Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 2002

Since the beginning of the school year, more than a quarter of voucher students in Miami-Dade County have returned to public schools. The reasons most kids and parents cite for abandoning their new private schools? Transportation difficulties, too tough a curriculum, too-strict discipline, culture shock and a lack of familiarity with new teachers, peers and school grounds. That's hardly an indictment of school choice or the Sunshine State's Opportunity Scholarship program. While choice opponents have been quick to seize on the transfers as evidence that vouchers don't work, they do acknowledge that the state's extra funding and oversight of failing schools - the schools that kids are exiting - have led to "dramatic improvement" there. What better argument to continue and expand the program? "Many reject vouchers, return to public schools," by Daniel A. Grech, The Miami Herald, November 3, 2002

The fall issue of American Experiment Quarterly (AEQ) contains a pair of pieces worth a look. The first is "The Making of Patriots," in which Leslie Lenkowsky, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, explains what it will take to reverse civic decline and inculcate in today's young people an understanding and appreciation for our system of government. The second is a collection of short essays on school choice culled from a symposium convened by Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment ("The Supremes Belt Out a New Hit: School Choice in Minnesota after Cleveland: A Symposium"). You'll find both pieces online at http://www.amexp.org (click on "AEQ").

Andrew LeFevre and Rea Hederman, American Legislative Exchange Council
October 2002

This is the latest in a series of state-level "report cards" from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Weighing in at 133 pages, it would have benefited from closer copyediting and more sophisticated statistical expertise, but it contains a wealth of useful data as well as an overall ranking of the fifty states according to their academic performance. The latter is based on a complex amalgam of SAT, ACT and NAEP results. While the authors acknowledge the limits of college-entrance exam score averages for purposes of rating states, they do it anyway. Each state gets a one-page summary report card. The chapters that follow deal with education inputs, outcomes and several ambitious efforts to find correlations between them. The authors work a bit too hard to show that more resources don't translate into stronger results, but they also deliver much handy data and some interesting analyses. You can buy a hard copy for $25 or download the whole thing by surfing to http://www.alec.org/meSWFiles/pdf/Education_Report_card.pdf.

Elizabeth Foster and Anne Simmons, Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.
October 2002

A new report by Massachusetts-based Recruiting New Teachers, Inc. (RNT) identifies America's 1100 community colleges as an untapped resource for attracting and training educators and helping to alleviate teacher shortages. The authors deem community colleges - where over a fifth of public school teachers begin their education - an insufficiently appreciated solution for a host of logical (and mostly obvious) reasons. For example, they typically enroll large numbers of local, minority students who may be better able to identify with urban kids and who are more likely to remain in their community to teach. The bulk of the report consists of observations about community-college teacher training programs and the students who enroll in them, with a few pages given over to profiles of exemplary programs. But RNT's vision of the community college's role - as feeder of would-be teachers to four-year colleges via "interinstitutional collaborations" - is too cramped. It neglects a far more interesting role for community colleges that could really revolutionize the teacher preparation process: as purveyors of fast, focused training in teaching fundamentals to college-educated people seeking alternative certification. This report is not available online, but hard copies can be ordered for $24.95 plus shipping and handling by calling 617-489-6000, emailing [email protected] or visiting http://www.recruitingteachers.org/news/2002TappingPotential.html.

General Accounting Office
October 29, 2002

Simultaneously disappointing critics of for-profit education and deflating education management organizations' (EMOs) claims of remarkable student progress, the General Accounting Office (GAO) has determined that no conclusions can be drawn about the academic performance, parental satisfaction, parental involvement or school climate in charter schools managed by EMOs. Reviewing research on three for-profit EMOs - Edison Schools, Mosaica Education and Chancellor Beacon Academies - the GAO noted that all but one study suffered from methodological problems, such as lack of a proper comparison group, incomplete data, or failure to study results over a sufficient period of time. (The lone methodologically sound study showed no significant difference between student performance at an Edison school in Florida and comparable public schools.) Despite its unsatisfying "conclusion," this report is useful for its summary of the EMOs' programs and curricula. It also highlights several critical points about EMO-managed charters and charter schools in general: more such schools are needed; those that exist must be given time to demonstrate their successes (or failures); and all schools must release data and be open to evaluation. Only then can we have an informed debate about the benefits of school choice and the role of profit-making firms in education. The report (GAO-03-11) is available online at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0311.pdf.

Kevin Donnelly, Education Forum
October 2002

New Zealand's Education Forum recently commissioned Australian education expert Kevin Donnelly to review the smaller country's national curriculum. He has delivered a scathing critique of it and of the New Zealand government's current effort to "stocktake" it. His criticisms center on five concerns: (1) the curriculum's continued reliance on an "outcomes-based approach&that&has been largely abandoned by equivalent education systems such as those in Australia and the United States"; (2) New Zealand's failure to recognize the "superiority of either a 'syllabus' or 'standards' approach to curriculum development utilized by successful education systems such as Singapore, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and South Korea"; (3) uncritical and excessive use of "a process-based approach to curriculum that fails to recognize properly the central importance of educational content"; (4) undue emphasis on "a student-centered view of learning to the detriment of&.the 'structure of the discipline'"; and (5) the government's failure to undertake a proper international comparative analysis of its curriculum. U.S. and other education reformers, particularly in places that are re-examining their own standards and curricula, may find this interesting and helpful as, of course, will aficionados of Kiwi education issues. You can find it on the web at http://www.educationforum.org.nz/documents/publications/review_school_curriculum.pdf.

U.S. Department of Education
September 2002

In reauthorizing the Perkins (voc ed) Act in 1998, Congress called for an independent panel to conduct a National Assessment of Vocational Education (NAVE). This is the 22-member panel's first report to Congress, published by the U.S. Department of Education and intended to help guide next year's Perkins reauthorization cycle. This "interim" report has limited value, as the panel says its advice on the tough issues awaits the final NAVE report, which may or may not get published by year's end. But lots of information about voc ed is provided in this hundred-page tome and some of it is surprising: most interesting to me, while the total number of credits earned by high-school students has risen (from an average 21.6 in 1982 to 25.2 in 1998), and while essentially all growth has taken place in "academic" courses, still the average number of vocational course credits on student transcripts has barely changed: from 4.7 to 4.0, with that modest decline halting in 1992. It remains true, however, that students who take more voc ed classes also tend to take fewer, easier, academic courses. Also interesting: by this group's calculations, one-third of post-secondary undergraduates, "are considered to be in vocational programs." There's more. It's clear that voc ed needs attention and that it will be a real challenge for Perkins reauthorizers to chart a new course for it. Today, it's something of a policy orphan, remote from the main strand of K-12 reform (which is unabashedly academic) and fitting uncomfortably into the issues associated with higher education. It will be interesting to see what this panel recommends. For that, however, you'll have to await their next report. To download this one, go to http://www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/NAVE/reports.html.