Bill Bennett's superb two-volume U.S. history, America: The Last Best Hope, is beginning to be adopted as a text by school systems and is now accompanied by all manner of useful educator tools and its own hefty, bumptious (like Bennett himself) history-education-makeover project.
Bill Bennett's superb two-volume U.S. history, America: The Last Best Hope, is beginning to be adopted as a text by school systems and is now accompanied by all manner of useful educator tools and its own hefty, bumptious (like Bennett himself) history-education-makeover project. Of particular value is the "Roadmap," with ample, high-quality online resources for both teachers and students, and "Team HOPE," a group of outstanding educators who are pushing for such a makeover. The non-profit Milken Institute is helping to make this happen (and involving a number of Milken prize-winning history teachers) as, of course, is Bennett's publisher. This is particularly timely in view of the strong recommendation of the new Bradley E Pluribus Unum project that the teaching of U.S. history get a lot more attention in our schools (and universities). You can find out more about "Team HOPE" and Bennett's books here and here. You can learn more about the Bradley Project here.
Marguerite Roza, School Finance Redesign Project, Center on Reinventing Public Education
May 15, 2008
In this short exploration of how the central offices of two (un-named) districts allocate their resources to individual schools, Marguerite Roza starts with the bold premise that "the resource allocation system is the very way in which organizations make choices about means and ends." Unfortunately, her interviews with district personnel make clear that they often have no idea how their decisions affect either means or ends or much of anything in between. For example, a psychologist assigned to cover 10 schools spends much of her time at only one (which her child attends). But these staff members nonetheless say things like, "I have no input into district resource allocations... I don't get my own supply budget or anything." They seem not to realize that they and how they spend their time is the main resource allocation. One district believes it is targeting literacy coaches toward low-income students when in fact it simply assigns one per school. The examples included here paint a distressing picture of the talents (or lack thereof) of central office staffs. They also show that bureaucratically allocating staff to schools is a recipe for educational disaster. Far better would be to allocate budgets to schools and let their leaders match resources to their differing needs for teachers, literacy coaches, psychologists and all the rest. Roza takes no stand here on the merits of such a weighted student funding approach, and indeed she acknowledges that "if school leadership is weak, then increasing the portion of resources allocated at the school level may not be a viable strategy." But it's no less viable than blindly assigning resources via bureaucratic formulae, especially if the architects and managers of such assignment systems are as clueless in most districts as they seem to be in the two profiled. You can read more for yourself here.
Naomi Chudowsky and Victor Chudowsky
Center on Education Policy
May 2008
NCLB asks all states not only to define "proficiency" in their own way but also to set their own pace for getting kids there by 2014. Some opted for an "incremental" approach whereby students would be expected to make modest gains each year while others "backloaded" their trajectories, telling Washington that they will produce most of the required test-score gains later on. (One might call this latter group the subprime borrowers of the NCLB racket; Gadfly basically did, back in 2003.) According to the Center on Education Policy, half the states took the incremental approach while 23 opted for "balloon mortgages." (Two others, Florida and Kansas, use a "blended trajectory," which really is just a less severe form of backloading.) This may or may not matter, considering the unreality of any state reaching 100 percent proficiency, at least if "proficiency" is meaningfully defined, which of course it isn't, in many states. Get the CEP analysis here.
You've heard it a hundred times: "We really need to benchmark our education standards to the best in the world," or words to that effect.
For a while, such talk came mostly from business leaders concerned about American competitiveness on a shrinking, flattening planet. Of late they've been joined by governors, chief state school officers, policy wonks, and others with an interest in the quality and performance of U.S. schools (and colleges).
They're right, too. To the extent that preparing young Americans to compete successfully in the global economy is an important function of our education system (along with keeping us safe in a dangerous world), we must surely look beyond our borders. We have ample evidence from TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and such about how our kids stack up alongside their age mates from other lands when it comes to academic achievement in core subjects. (Not nearly well enough is the short version. Here's a good source.) We also have plenty of data from the OECD and UNESCO about how U.S. schools and colleges compare quantitatively with the education systems of other countries. (Once we led on measures such as secondary school completion and tertiary participation, but no longer.)
Knowing that our results are dragging, however, is not the same as "benchmarking" our own education standards and practices to those of other countries. Simply determining which countries do better is akin to saying we know which horses are ahead in the Derby. It doesn't tell us anything useful about those steeds' bloodlines, training, food, jockeys, etc., information by which we might consider revising what happens in our own pastures, stables, and foaling sheds.
Hence the call for such education benchmarking, a classic expression of which can be found in the words of NGA executive director Ray Scheppach. He writes:
To gauge our future competitiveness, the United States needs to know each year how our students are performing compared to their international peers, particularly in relation to major trading partners such as Brazil, Denmark, China and India. International benchmarking will allow us to do this...Over the last two decades, states have provided the leadership to create education standards and assessments. Benchmarking them to international standards is just the next step. Further, most of the expertise necessary to take that next step resides in the states, not the federal government. The existing NCLB framework is helpful, but governors, chief state school officials and legislators understand the urgency of international benchmarking, and they clearly understand the link to competitiveness. (See here.)
But what exactly do Scheppach and others have in mind by "international benchmarking"? It's a generic sort of term, mainly used in the business world. (For once, Wikipedia has a decent definition.) What does it mean in education?
This was on my mind during a useful NCES-sponsored meeting the other week on international testing. Participants learned much about TIMSS and PISA and the rest, but participants such as Roy Romer and Sandy Kress made clear that, like the horse race, international testing is just the beginning. Indeed, they properly cautioned against a headlong rush by every state to administer PISA to its own students. (Serious concerns were also voiced by many regarding PISA itself, doubts that I share, but that's a topic for another day.) What they want for American education is not more testing but more true benchmarking.
That seems right, but what exactly does it mean? What do we most want to know about other countries' education standards, systems and outcomes that might help us to improve our own, whether state-by-state or for the entire nation? Reflecting on this, I offer for consideration these seven elements as a starting point. (Assume, as you read, that the countries about which we want to know these things are the high flyers, those with which we fret about competing.)
First, we want to know what's in their content standards in core subjects and at various age and grade levels. What are the skills and knowledge of, say, math, that they expect their 8th graders (or 14-year-olds) to have mastered? What about their high school graduates and university entrants?
Second, we want to understand key aspects of their delivery system. Are their schools uniform or diverse? Is the curriculum tracked or universal? Are their classes large or small? How are their teachers prepared, compensated, and deployed? Are kids assigned to schools or given choices? What uses do they make of technology? Of textbooks? How long are their days and years? What about pre-school? And on and on. Yes, it's an enormous area but, curiously, it's also the easiest to get information on. Here's a list, for example, of OECD "country surveys" on education in Belgium, and here's one for Canada. The challenge here is more like drinking from a fire hose than ferreting out and making sense of obscure information, which is what we encounter with the other six.
Third, we want to know how they assess the performance of their schools and students. What measures do they use? Where do these come from? Who manages that process? Are they true external audits? Comparable from one region of the country to the next?
Fourth, where do they set their "cut scores" or "passing levels"? How good is good enough in those lands? How well must a student perform on those assessments--what skills and knowledge must he prove that he has acquired and to what extent--to be deemed satisfactory? Do such scores matter only for individual students or also for schools as institutions? Is there a single performance level or multiple standards?
Fifth, what sort of accountability system is in place? How are test results (and other performance measures) used? Are they made public? Used to determine promotion, graduation, or university entry? Used by employers? Any consequences for teachers and principals? Incentives? Rewards? Interventions?
Sixth, how are their young people doing against those standards and cut scores? Are 30 percent of them passing? Ninety percent? How much does it vary by gender, ethnicity, age, etc? In short, how well is their delivery system educating their kids against their standards?
Seventh, and finally, how well prepared (and for what) are the young people who meet those standards--especially at the conclusion of secondary school? Are they ready for university level work? For successful employment by modern firms with only minimal job-specific training? Are they capable of working (or studying) successfully in other countries or only in their own? In other words, if we were to do for our young people what they do for theirs, how satisfactorily would we have attained our own hopes and dreams for an education makeover suited to today's world economy?
I think that's what we mean, or ought to mean, by international benchmarking. But I'd surely welcome your thoughts, too.
"We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here." Absent context, one might guess that Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia's non-voting congressional delegate, was decrying, say, the inadequacy of the nation's response to child abuse. Not so. The scourge against which Norton so hyperbolically railed is, in fact, a scholarship program that has allowed nearly 2,000 D.C. students to escape their failing district schools for a safer and sounder private education. Is anybody listening? Sadly, we hear that leaders of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program are increasingly doubtful about the prospects of Congress reauthorizing the vouchers, which narrowly passed five years ago behind a Republican majority. Sustaining this valuable program is going to require, inter alia, a major political initiative by Mayor Fenty. Else Delegate Norton will be proven right; the children will indeed be victims. And she will be among their victimizers.
"Fate of D.C. Voucher Program Darkens," by Valerie Strauss and Bill Turque, Washington Post, June 9, 2008
More glum feedback for the Gates Foundation's pricey initiative to create and support small schools--and others enraptured with smallness per se as an education reform strategy. First, there was this interim federal report on small learning communities, which found that they do little to improve student achievement. Now, there is this story out of Oregon where dropout rates for the small schools are just as dismal as those of the bigger high schools that they were designed to replace (i.e, still around 50 percent). Test scores and attendance haven't budged either. Fortunately, Gates leaders are paying attention. Says education chief Vicki Phillips (a recent Oregonian herself), "We have learned that small by itself is not enough. Good curriculum and instruction don't just show up...We need to get more dramatic results." Exactly so.
"Oregon's small-school experiment slow to see results" by Betsy Hammond and Lisa Grace Lednicer, The Oregonian, June 8, 2008
When Gadfly wrote, "Despite what our good friend Jay Mathews tells you, AP is not for everyone," he didn't expect that the selfsame Jay Mathews would then challenge him to a duel. Only in words, mercifully. The result is a rousing, even illuminating, exchange between this superb Washington Post reporter and our own Checker Finn. You can find it below.
"Is AP Good for Everyone?" by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, June 8, 2008
Another day, another state content to let its kids continue to earn meaningless high school diplomas. Pennsylvania's Senate Education Committee voted this week, 10-1, in favor of a bill that would give the legislature exclusive power to add graduation requirements, this in response to the state board of education's plan to require students to pass exit exams in English, math, science, and social studies. Senator James Rhoades, who chairs the Education Committee, explained that "testing could put increased pressure on kids and it could result in better behavior in school and more work, but kids who want to be successful are already doing that. The others will end up dropping out of school rather than face tests they find difficult." That's not what's happened in states that do have graduation tests, but who cares about the facts?
"Senate Committee Trying to Block Exit Exam Move," by Tracie Mauriello, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 10, 2008
Bill Bennett's superb two-volume U.S. history, America: The Last Best Hope, is beginning to be adopted as a text by school systems and is now accompanied by all manner of useful educator tools and its own hefty, bumptious (like Bennett himself) history-education-makeover project. Of particular value is the "Roadmap," with ample, high-quality online resources for both teachers and students, and "Team HOPE," a group of outstanding educators who are pushing for such a makeover. The non-profit Milken Institute is helping to make this happen (and involving a number of Milken prize-winning history teachers) as, of course, is Bennett's publisher. This is particularly timely in view of the strong recommendation of the new Bradley E Pluribus Unum project that the teaching of U.S. history get a lot more attention in our schools (and universities). You can find out more about "Team HOPE" and Bennett's books here and here. You can learn more about the Bradley Project here.
Marguerite Roza, School Finance Redesign Project, Center on Reinventing Public Education
May 15, 2008
In this short exploration of how the central offices of two (un-named) districts allocate their resources to individual schools, Marguerite Roza starts with the bold premise that "the resource allocation system is the very way in which organizations make choices about means and ends." Unfortunately, her interviews with district personnel make clear that they often have no idea how their decisions affect either means or ends or much of anything in between. For example, a psychologist assigned to cover 10 schools spends much of her time at only one (which her child attends). But these staff members nonetheless say things like, "I have no input into district resource allocations... I don't get my own supply budget or anything." They seem not to realize that they and how they spend their time is the main resource allocation. One district believes it is targeting literacy coaches toward low-income students when in fact it simply assigns one per school. The examples included here paint a distressing picture of the talents (or lack thereof) of central office staffs. They also show that bureaucratically allocating staff to schools is a recipe for educational disaster. Far better would be to allocate budgets to schools and let their leaders match resources to their differing needs for teachers, literacy coaches, psychologists and all the rest. Roza takes no stand here on the merits of such a weighted student funding approach, and indeed she acknowledges that "if school leadership is weak, then increasing the portion of resources allocated at the school level may not be a viable strategy." But it's no less viable than blindly assigning resources via bureaucratic formulae, especially if the architects and managers of such assignment systems are as clueless in most districts as they seem to be in the two profiled. You can read more for yourself here.
Naomi Chudowsky and Victor Chudowsky
Center on Education Policy
May 2008
NCLB asks all states not only to define "proficiency" in their own way but also to set their own pace for getting kids there by 2014. Some opted for an "incremental" approach whereby students would be expected to make modest gains each year while others "backloaded" their trajectories, telling Washington that they will produce most of the required test-score gains later on. (One might call this latter group the subprime borrowers of the NCLB racket; Gadfly basically did, back in 2003.) According to the Center on Education Policy, half the states took the incremental approach while 23 opted for "balloon mortgages." (Two others, Florida and Kansas, use a "blended trajectory," which really is just a less severe form of backloading.) This may or may not matter, considering the unreality of any state reaching 100 percent proficiency, at least if "proficiency" is meaningfully defined, which of course it isn't, in many states. Get the CEP analysis here.
