The Education Gadfly Weekly

Indiana Center for Evaluation
September 2001

As is well known, Cleveland is one of two cities in the U.S. with publicly funded scholarships (aka vouchers) available to low-income children whose families would like to send them to private schools. About 4000 youngsters now participate. From the program's beginning (1996-97), one of the organizations evaluating it (in this case at the behest of the state of Ohio) has been the Indiana Center for Evaluation, led by Kim Metcalf. They have now published a second major study of the Cleveland program, this one covering three school years (ending in 2000) and focusing on younger children who entered (and didn't enter) the program as kindergartners or first graders. The study looked at their achievement (and various other factors) at the beginning of first grade, the end of first grade and the end of second grade. The study is complex because it seeks to compare four groups of youngsters and to draw conclusions about the scholarship program's impact on them over two or three years. Aficionados of voucher research will want to see for themselves. The main conclusions are ambiguous. It turns out that the student populations were very similar (though the scholarship users were somewhat less apt to be minorities), that their teachers were very similar (on the few dimensions that were examined), and that their academic achievement shows no clear pattern. All groups improved as they went through school. Scholarship youngsters who began in kindergarten did better than non-scholarship (i.e. public school) students as of first grade but by the end of second grade the differences were statistically insignificant. Nobody can say with certainty (at least not based on these data) whether the program is "working", but it's not hurting (and the cost per student is considerably less than that of the Cleveland public schools). As one often hears, more research would seem to be called for. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court may take the First Amendment case this fall. If so, we may learn more about the program's constitutionality even as we await further data on its efficacy. You can get an 11-page summary and/or the 63-page technical report from the Indiana Center for Evaluation, Smith Research Center, 2805 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47408. Phone (800) 511-6575. Fax (812) 856-5890. E-mail [email protected]. Surf to http://www.indiana.edu/~iuice.

U.S. Department of Education
2001

As we near the final stage of the long-pending E.S.E.A. reauthorization process in Congress, we find ourselves presented with a long-awaited study of today's Title I schools, conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) by the firms Westat and Policy Studies Associates. This is not so much an evaluation of the Title I program itself (which some people insist isn't really a "program" so much as a "funding stream") as it is a study of 71 high-poverty schools and a group of their students who moved from third to fifth grade during the course of this longitudinal project. The data were gathered between 1996 and 1999 as policy changes dictated in the 1994 E.S.E.A. amendments were beginning to kick in. The report consists mostly of information about which school policies and instructional practices seem to be related to greater and lesser pupil achievement, and you may well want to plunge into this sea yourself. (The executive summary-Volume I-is 16 pages; the technical report-Volume II-runs to 120 pages.) Two points struck me. First, not much gap-closing occurred between third and fifth grade for Title I students attending these schools. They were about as far behind national (and urban) norms in reading and math at the end of the multi-year study as at the beginning. In other words, nothing that was tried really worked very well. Second, the variables that the researchers opted to examine (for their impact on student learning) were but a handful of those they might have studied or that might make a difference. For example, they considered how highly teachers rated their professional development but never looked at any gauges of teacher knowledge, experience or competence. They also sought out instructional arrangements that the profession tends to favor (e.g. NCTM math, "exploration in instruction") but didn't look to see whether a school's curriculum or pedagogy was based on anything with proven efficacy. (NCTM math, by the way, showed a negative effect in high-poverty schools, a positive effect in less poor schools.) Finally, let us note that it took the analysts two years to crank out their analysis and that this report emerged after Senate and House had taken action on the current reauthorization. There have been previous examples of the Department's evaluation shop timing the release of its studies just a little too cleverly-so that they do or don't impact pending policy choices. One wonders if we're looking at another example of that. If you want to see for yourself, the document code is Doc#2001-20 and you can write to ED Pubs, Editorial Publications Center, U.S. Department of Education, P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794. You could also e-mail [email protected]. You could fax (301) 470-1244, phone (877) 433-7827 or surf to www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs.html or www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/eval.html.

Department for Education and Skills, UK
2001

Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has published a 74 page "white paper" that sets forth the direction it intends to move British primary-secondary education during Blair's second term. The emphasis is on high schools. The rhetorical and policy thrust-this may not surprise you-is a blend of standards, accountability, flexibility and diversity, including the creation of distinctive new schools, some of them religious. But the main controversy centers on the government's plan to outsource failing schools to private operators and to encourage other schools to outsource various services. Not bad for a Labour Government, one is tempted to say. Yet there may be less to it than meets the eye. When a school voluntarily teams up with an outside organization, for example, its staff must remain government employees. Even when a failing school is involuntarily "outsourced" to a private operator, its staff, again, may opt to remain public employees rather than employees of the private operator. And while a successful school can gain some freedom with respect to teacher pay and working conditions, there will be no individual contracts, i.e. the group-think collective-bargaining framework remains intact. In sum, there are many good ideas here but in almost every instance the government seems to have begun its journey with one leg intentionally broken. Still, we wish them well-K-12 education in Britain needs improvement as badly as in the U.S.-and will be watching with interest. To get a copy of Schools Achieving Success, the fastest route is to surf to http://www.dfes.gov.uk/achievingsuccess.

Alan Siegel
2001

The outstanding performance of Japanese students on the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) examinations has prompted numerous studies of Japanese teaching practices by researchers eager to duplicate such success in their own countries' classrooms. Now N.Y.U. professor Alan Siegel has taken a look at videotaped lessons from TIMSS classroom studies in an effort to spot the salient features of Japanese teaching. Siegel walks the reader through sample Japanese geometry and algebra lessons full of "deep and rich" content, noting the teachers' skill at eliciting and prompting responses from students. Instead of extensive group work and "discovery-based learning," which have taken hold in many U.S. schools, he says the "grapple and tell" method is extensively used in Japan. Here, students struggle with a problem in class-individually or in small groups-often without finding a solution. Then, a master teacher presents "every step of [the] solution without divulging the answer," thereby helping students to "learn to think deeply." Siegel also rebuts some misleading claims by other studies of Japanese pedagogy, such as the assertion that Japanese teachers "come closer to implementing the spirit of current ideas advanced by U.S. reformers than do U.S. teachers." You can access the study online at http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/siegel/ST11.pdf

High-achieving, high-poverty schools are no longer a novelty for elementary or middle school-aged kids, but helping disadvantaged youngsters succeed in high school has been more challenging. An article in Teacher Magazine describes the efforts of an organized group of parents in California to prevent their kids from becoming high school dropout statistics. Parents of Children of African Descent (PCAD) was formed by a group of Berkeley High School parents after they learned that half of the school's African American 9th graders were flunking core academic classes. Invited by the school's principal to develop an intervention plan, the parents created an alternative learning community within the high school where failing 9th graders would be taught in small classes by hand-picked teachers. Participating freshmen would be supported by student mentors and adult learning partners, and by their parents, who would agree to respond promptly to teachers' calls home. After the first year, there were signs that many students participating in the program had turned themselves around, but the program itself was discontinued for reasons that are easy to understand but hard to stomach. For more, see "Damage Control," by Meredith Maran, Teacher Magazine, August 2001, http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/tmstory.cfm?slug=01berkeley.h13

If your neighborhood school announces that it is introducing a new kind of instruction centered around student projects, you'll want to visit Teachers College Record's website, TCRecord.org, which this week reprises a 1921 symposium on the project method called "Dangers and Difficulties of the Project Method and How to Overcome Them." We recommend "Projects and Purposes in Teaching and Learning" by William C. Bagley, which discusses three dangers of relying on the project method: a reduction in our ability to retain what is learned, an exclusive emphasis on the instrumental value of knowledge, and a de-emphasis of non-purposive learning. Surf to http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=3983

Education issues aren't foremost in our minds today, but I will note that the K-12 concern that reached my ears most frequently in recent weeks is the vaunted "teacher shortage" that our schools are said to face. As summer vacation ended, the press was full of accounts of extraordinary measures that public-school systems were taking to ensure that their classrooms would have enough adults ready to receive the children. Teachers were imported from India and Austria. "Emergency" certificates were given to all sorts of people who had never taught before. Signing bonuses were paid to individual teachers-and sometimes finders' fees handed to the agencies that located them. Substitute teachers were readied for full-time classroom duty. And so forth.

Surely, the journalists said, this sort of thing will only worsen in coming years-and would I please confirm that? After all, doesn't America need to hire two million-or was it three million-new teachers in the next decade? I believe I was being invited to say that the only possible way to forestall this crisis would be to dump zillions of dollars into salaries, crash training programs and suchlike.

Talk about old-paradigm thinking! The most striking thing about the U.S. teacher "shortage" is the extent to which it has mostly been induced by rules, customs and practices that could be changed with a flick of the policymakers' wrists. But instead of changing the rules, we proclaim a crisis. One senses that some groups see their interests advanced by this.

Almost everyone who has looked at the "teacher shortage" has noticed that it's spotty, not universal. It's concentrated in certain subjects (e.g. math, science, special ed), in certain kinds of communities (inner cities, rural towns), and in certain parts of the country (sun-belt states with rapid enrollment increases and those that are swelling their teacher ranks as part of a class-size reduction strategy).

Many states still train far more teachers than their schools can hire. (A 1999 Pennsylvania study found that state producing 20,000 newly certified teachers annually even though it had just 5100 teacher openings per year.) Communities with static and shrinking enrollments face few shortages. Cushy suburbs in major metropolitan areas have plenty of applicants for nearly every classroom position. So do most charter and private schools-which are free to hire almost anyone they like. And it's common knowledge that the United States contains a vast "reserve pool" of teachers, people who trained for this occupation, or formerly engaged in it, but who for various reasons are not teaching today. In fact, most "new hires" in American schools are not freshly minted teachers bounding out of their preparation program. A third of them are former teachers returning to the profession while another quarter are teachers who prepared to teach at some earlier time but put it off.

Why are some schools having trouble finding enough grown-ups for their classrooms while others are awash in applicants? Look to the education field's bizarre policies and practices. Look, in particular, at four common practices that make precious little sense.

* Uniform salary schedules. It's crazy to pay the same salaries to people in high-demand subjects (e.g. high school science and math) as to those in high-supply fields (e.g. middle school social studies). It's insane to pay teachers in tough schools and challenging assignments the same as those in pleasant, low-risk settings. It's nuts to give identical compensation to outstanding and inept teachers, to hard workers and clock-watchers. Yet we do all those things in public education. If instead we developed a rational, market-sensitive compensation system for educators, shortages would wither.

* Certification. Today we make the public-school teaching force pass through the eye of the state-certification needle. Yet private and charter schools don't do that, nor do colleges and universities. Though there's mounting evidence that traditional certification has little bearing on classroom effectiveness, we still require it-and the ed-school based training that is its universal prerequisite. There's also mounting evidence that people who lack traditional certification-such as those in the Teach for America program-can be as effective as those with it, yet we're stingy with these alternate pathways into the classroom and grudging toward people who follow them. In most places, they must still take the Mickey-Mouse courses, though they may have longer in which to do so.

* Personnel management. In most communities, those running public schools-their principals-have little say over who teaches in them. Due to seniority systems, bumping rights, union contracts and centralized personnel offices, the principal has scant control over who is assigned to his school, who leaves, how much they're paid, how to reward excellence, how to cope with incompetence. No effective modern organization operates this way. It's a hold over from old-style industrial management and government civil-service procedures. But industry and government are moving beyond it. Only the public schools remain mired in it.

* People and capital. Whenever a school system has a spare dollar, it usually spends all hundred cents on teacher salaries. It almost never looks seriously at alternatives: at completely different ways of structuring schools (e.g. a few master teachers working with a large number of aides and tutors) or other education delivery systems (e.g. technology) that might boost productivity and effectiveness. So nothing changes. And "shortages" are proclaimed.

It's no bad thing to import well-educated people from other lands to teach young Americans. In this, public education is following the lead of Silicon Valley, which looked overseas when it couldn't find enough U.S. workers with the proper knowledge and skills. But we wouldn't have to do this if we made these few (albeit profound) policy changes. Our shortages would melt away. Our schools would improve. Our children would learn more. And our teachers would get better, thus easing our quality problem at the same time along with the quantity challenge.

Union and school district negotiators have reached a tentative agreement on changes in Cincinnati's teacher pay-for-performance plan, this in response to complaints from teachers about the evaluation process. Under this agreement, teachers will receive more training on how the evaluation system works, they'll be evaluated on more standards at a time, and more teachers with many years of experience will be able to opt out of having pay tied to their performance evaluations. It's unclear how significant these changes are, though allowing veteran teachers to opt out of the system is surely not a good sign. While Cincinnati is mostly known for its struggling performance-pay plan, the district is also embarking on a major overhaul of its neighborhood high schools this year, converting them into smaller, more specialized schools with the help of a $1.5 million grant from the federal government and a sizable grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a big believer in small schools). The high school reform effort is described in a long article by Jennifer Mrozowski in The Cincinnati Enquirer. In a separate article, she looks at the impact of a scathing report on the schools that was released by Cincinnati's business community a decade ago. Over the years, the district has embraced many of the suggestions offered by the CEOs who drafted the report, including slashing expenditures for district administration from 13 percent of the budget to 5 percent, hiring a business executive to supervise the school system's business operations, and creating a training facility for teachers and principals. What's the upshot of all this reform activity? While test scores in Cincinnati have risen some in recent years, Ohio still rates the district an "academic emergency" based on its test scores and graduation and attendance rates.

"Teachers, CPS Alter Pay-for-Performance Plan," by Jennifer Mrozowski, The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 1, 2001, http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2001/09/01/loc_teachers_cps_alter.html

"Breaking Down Schools to Build Them Up," by Jennifer Mrozowski, The Cincinnati Enquirer, August 26, 2001, http://enquirer.com/editions/2001/08/26/loc_breaking_down.html

"City School Reforms Began with Buenger," by Jennifer Mrozowski, The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 4, 2001, http://enquirer.com/editions/2001/09/04/loc_city_school_reforms.html

On September 11 at 8:45 a.m., I was having a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper when I heard a tremendous boom behind me. I live in Brooklyn, about three city blocks from New York Harbor, and directly across the Harbor from my neighborhood is New York City's financial district.

At first I thought nothing of it (things happen in a city this big without your ever knowing where or what they were). Then a few minutes later, a friend called from work to tell me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV for a minute, leashed one of my dogs, and ran to the waterfront. I got there just in time to see the second plane hit the second tower. Flames and smoke were pouring from both towers, against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. About six other people--all strangers--stood watching with me, and everyone was in shock, some crying. Someone said, "This is terrorism," and one woman began sobbing. The wind was blowing in our direction, and the sky was filled with little bits of paper, like confetti in a ticker-tape parade; it was the paper from people's desks at the World Trade Center.

It was a terrible and frightening sight, and I could not stand to watch the flames, knowing that people were dying as I stood watching. I returned to my home and watched on TV. When the towers began collapsing an hour later, the sky--which had been so beautiful--began to darken with the heavy smoke. As the wind continued to blow east towards our neighborhood, ash rained down on the local streets all day and the air was acrid with the smell of fire and chemical odors that I could not identify.

The spirit of the people of this city, known for its toughness, was an amazing demonstration of civic cooperation. I went to the nearest hospital with two friends to donate blood; there we were sent to Metrotech Center, which is closer to the Brooklyn Bridge; and once we got to Metrotech, we ran into other neighbors, who told us that the lines to donate blood were so long that newcomers were turned away. My daughter-in-law, in upper Manhattan, was also turned away because so many people turned out to donate blood, overwhelming the capacity of the emergency centers.

With the subways shut down and the bridges and tunnels closed, people in the neighborhood walked home from their jobs in Manhattan. Some walked five, seven, ten miles. No one complained.

Like many other Americans, I have been glued to the television. Unlike others, I have gone occasionally to the harbor, to see what is happening. The most startling fact is that the towers are gone. Where they used to be is a huge plume of smoke. Tonight, I went to walk on "The Promenade," which looks directly at the lower Manhattan financial district. About 1,000 other people were there, sitting, walking, watching. I don't know what they were watching for; I don't know what I was watching for. Just to see the remarkably sad sight of the Manhattan skyline without the landmark twin towers.

There are no saving graces to this horror and devastation. But in its midst, I feel proud of my fellow New Yorkers. Of their self-discipline; their caring for others; and in the case of the hundreds of heroic rescue workers who sacrificed their lives while trying to find survivors, their incredible courage.

An examination of pass-fail records from tests of basic skills and subject knowledge taken by Illinois teachers over the last thirteen years revealed that 5,243 current teachers had failed at least one exam, even though these tests are pitched at an extremely low level. Most teachers eventually pass all tests, but 868 people now teaching in Illinois schools have yet to pass the state's basic skills test. Children in high-poverty schools are roughly five times more likely to be taught by teachers who stumbled in efforts to pass these tests. After this multi-part series on teacher tests was published by the Chicago Sun-Times last week, Gov. George Ryan asked the state board of education to investigate the issues raised by the analysis.

"5,243 Illinois teachers failed key exams," by Rosalind Rossi, Becky Beaupre and Kate N. Grossman, Chicago Sun Times, September 6, 2001, http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-main06.html

Also in this series were: "Kids take the test, say it's too easy" (Sept. 6); "Poorest kids often wind up with the weakest teachers" (Sept. 7); "Why are teacher tests secret? politicians ask" (Sept. 7); "Failing teachers spur hearings" (Sept. 9); "Other states do it better" (Sept. 9)

In New Jersey, students who flunk the state's exit exam can still receive a high school diploma if they earn passing marks on a series of performance assessment tasks drawn up by the state. Last year, 6100 students-nearly 9 percent of graduates-got their diplomas this way. Twenty-two schools in poor urban districts awarded at least 30 percent of their diplomas through the performance assessment process; five schools issued more than half of their diplomas this way. School officials defend the option as important for students who test poorly or need extra help, but Paul Reville of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform notes "You could argue that this is going back to essentially a two-tiered, tracked system. That was precisely what the standards movement was trying to move away from." It is impossible to determine whether the performance assessment is equivalent to the state tests because New Jersey officials refuse to release any sample performance tasks for security reasons. For details, see "Special Program Gives Kids Another Chance to Pass," by Deborah Yaffe, Gannett State Bureau/INjersey.com, September 2, 2001, http://www.injersey.com/news/story2000/0,20905,440661,00.html

The Brookings Institution has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a "National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education." According to The Washington Post, the commission will be managed by Paul Hill and Tom Loveless, and will tackle issues surrounding school choice such as how it affects school quality and student learning and whether it affects poor and minority access to strong public schools. (Noted in "The Ideas Industry," by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, September 11, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/fedpage/columns/ideasindustry/A7050-2001Sep10.html)

Alan Siegel
2001

The outstanding performance of Japanese students on the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) examinations has prompted numerous studies of Japanese teaching practices by researchers eager to duplicate such success in their own countries' classrooms. Now N.Y.U. professor Alan Siegel has taken a look at videotaped lessons from TIMSS classroom studies in an effort to spot the salient features of Japanese teaching. Siegel walks the reader through sample Japanese geometry and algebra lessons full of "deep and rich" content, noting the teachers' skill at eliciting and prompting responses from students. Instead of extensive group work and "discovery-based learning," which have taken hold in many U.S. schools, he says the "grapple and tell" method is extensively used in Japan. Here, students struggle with a problem in class-individually or in small groups-often without finding a solution. Then, a master teacher presents "every step of [the] solution without divulging the answer," thereby helping students to "learn to think deeply." Siegel also rebuts some misleading claims by other studies of Japanese pedagogy, such as the assertion that Japanese teachers "come closer to implementing the spirit of current ideas advanced by U.S. reformers than do U.S. teachers." You can access the study online at http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/siegel/ST11.pdf

Department for Education and Skills, UK
2001

Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has published a 74 page "white paper" that sets forth the direction it intends to move British primary-secondary education during Blair's second term. The emphasis is on high schools. The rhetorical and policy thrust-this may not surprise you-is a blend of standards, accountability, flexibility and diversity, including the creation of distinctive new schools, some of them religious. But the main controversy centers on the government's plan to outsource failing schools to private operators and to encourage other schools to outsource various services. Not bad for a Labour Government, one is tempted to say. Yet there may be less to it than meets the eye. When a school voluntarily teams up with an outside organization, for example, its staff must remain government employees. Even when a failing school is involuntarily "outsourced" to a private operator, its staff, again, may opt to remain public employees rather than employees of the private operator. And while a successful school can gain some freedom with respect to teacher pay and working conditions, there will be no individual contracts, i.e. the group-think collective-bargaining framework remains intact. In sum, there are many good ideas here but in almost every instance the government seems to have begun its journey with one leg intentionally broken. Still, we wish them well-K-12 education in Britain needs improvement as badly as in the U.S.-and will be watching with interest. To get a copy of Schools Achieving Success, the fastest route is to surf to http://www.dfes.gov.uk/achievingsuccess.

Indiana Center for Evaluation
September 2001

As is well known, Cleveland is one of two cities in the U.S. with publicly funded scholarships (aka vouchers) available to low-income children whose families would like to send them to private schools. About 4000 youngsters now participate. From the program's beginning (1996-97), one of the organizations evaluating it (in this case at the behest of the state of Ohio) has been the Indiana Center for Evaluation, led by Kim Metcalf. They have now published a second major study of the Cleveland program, this one covering three school years (ending in 2000) and focusing on younger children who entered (and didn't enter) the program as kindergartners or first graders. The study looked at their achievement (and various other factors) at the beginning of first grade, the end of first grade and the end of second grade. The study is complex because it seeks to compare four groups of youngsters and to draw conclusions about the scholarship program's impact on them over two or three years. Aficionados of voucher research will want to see for themselves. The main conclusions are ambiguous. It turns out that the student populations were very similar (though the scholarship users were somewhat less apt to be minorities), that their teachers were very similar (on the few dimensions that were examined), and that their academic achievement shows no clear pattern. All groups improved as they went through school. Scholarship youngsters who began in kindergarten did better than non-scholarship (i.e. public school) students as of first grade but by the end of second grade the differences were statistically insignificant. Nobody can say with certainty (at least not based on these data) whether the program is "working", but it's not hurting (and the cost per student is considerably less than that of the Cleveland public schools). As one often hears, more research would seem to be called for. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court may take the First Amendment case this fall. If so, we may learn more about the program's constitutionality even as we await further data on its efficacy. You can get an 11-page summary and/or the 63-page technical report from the Indiana Center for Evaluation, Smith Research Center, 2805 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47408. Phone (800) 511-6575. Fax (812) 856-5890. E-mail [email protected]. Surf to http://www.indiana.edu/~iuice.

U.S. Department of Education
2001

As we near the final stage of the long-pending E.S.E.A. reauthorization process in Congress, we find ourselves presented with a long-awaited study of today's Title I schools, conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) by the firms Westat and Policy Studies Associates. This is not so much an evaluation of the Title I program itself (which some people insist isn't really a "program" so much as a "funding stream") as it is a study of 71 high-poverty schools and a group of their students who moved from third to fifth grade during the course of this longitudinal project. The data were gathered between 1996 and 1999 as policy changes dictated in the 1994 E.S.E.A. amendments were beginning to kick in. The report consists mostly of information about which school policies and instructional practices seem to be related to greater and lesser pupil achievement, and you may well want to plunge into this sea yourself. (The executive summary-Volume I-is 16 pages; the technical report-Volume II-runs to 120 pages.) Two points struck me. First, not much gap-closing occurred between third and fifth grade for Title I students attending these schools. They were about as far behind national (and urban) norms in reading and math at the end of the multi-year study as at the beginning. In other words, nothing that was tried really worked very well. Second, the variables that the researchers opted to examine (for their impact on student learning) were but a handful of those they might have studied or that might make a difference. For example, they considered how highly teachers rated their professional development but never looked at any gauges of teacher knowledge, experience or competence. They also sought out instructional arrangements that the profession tends to favor (e.g. NCTM math, "exploration in instruction") but didn't look to see whether a school's curriculum or pedagogy was based on anything with proven efficacy. (NCTM math, by the way, showed a negative effect in high-poverty schools, a positive effect in less poor schools.) Finally, let us note that it took the analysts two years to crank out their analysis and that this report emerged after Senate and House had taken action on the current reauthorization. There have been previous examples of the Department's evaluation shop timing the release of its studies just a little too cleverly-so that they do or don't impact pending policy choices. One wonders if we're looking at another example of that. If you want to see for yourself, the document code is Doc#2001-20 and you can write to ED Pubs, Editorial Publications Center, U.S. Department of Education, P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794. You could also e-mail [email protected]. You could fax (301) 470-1244, phone (877) 433-7827 or surf to www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs.html or www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/eval.html.