The Education Gadfly Weekly

Patte Barth, The Education Trust
Winter 2003

Education Watch: Achievement, Attainment, and Opportunity from Elementary School Through College
The Education Trust
Winter 2003

These two reports from the Education Trust document the unequal educational treatment of low-income and minority students 49 years after Brown v. Board of Education. This subtle segregation takes the form not of separate schools but of different expectations, opportunities and levels of attainment. In the first report, author Patte Barth draws from recent large-scale economic and education studies to argue that, in order to prepare all students to succeed in college or the workplace, all students must be exposed to a rigorous, college prep curriculum. According to Barth, "the research is clear and compelling: the single biggest predictor of success in college is the quality and intensity of a student's high school curriculum - more significant than test scores or class rank. In fact, these factors trump socio-economic status as an influence on student success." Despite the proven importance of subjecting all students to a rigorous academic high school curriculum, the second report, Education Watch: Achievement, Attainment, and Opportunity from Elementary School through College, shows that "in almost every state minority students are enrolled in lower level classes, are assigned to less-qualified teachers, and are disproportionately placed in special education - or suspended from school entirely." The report includes summary reports with state-specific data on achievement gaps, opportunity gaps, and attainment gaps, as well as clear recommendations about what should be done to eliminate this subtle segregation. To get the first report, go to http://www.edtrust.org/main/main/reports.asp and click "more info" to download. The second report is at http://www.edtrust.org/main/documents/summaries2003/US_statesum.qxd.pdf, or you can go straight to the state summary data at http://www.edtrust.org/main/main/states.html.

Parent Leadership Associates
2003

A series of handy how-to's for parents and would-be ed reformers. The first volume explains the importance of collecting and analyzing data to help understand the achievement gap at a particular school, and outlines the blowback that reformers will likely get from administrators and teachers once they demand numbers - and start making them public. The second volume is an instructional guide on how to collect and analyze data. To order, go to http://www.plassociates.org/publications.html#gap or call 859-233-9849.

Kathryn McDermott et. al., MassINC
2003

This report from MassINC's new Center for Education Research and Policy (co-sponsored by the Boston Foundation and the UMass Center for Education Policy) reviews the current array of education choices available to Bay State students and finds them "unevenly and inequitably distributed," meaning that they keep many poor children stuck in bad schools. The good news is that "at least one in four Massachusetts students are [sic] in a setting over which their families exercised some form of choice." (Almost a dozen different forms of education choice were tallied here.) The bad news is that most students' "ability to exercise school choice remains an accident of birth and is determined by family income and zip code." This is not too surprising, given that about two-thirds of Massachusetts choice options involve private/parochial schools and the state (which has a highly restrictive Blaine amendment) has nothing like vouchers. The upshot, say the authors, is widespread unmet demand for school choice, especially among poor and minority families, and the likelihood that this problem will worsen as school systems seek to comply with the choice provisions of No Child Left Behind. (NCLB's choice provisions will boost demand without substantially affecting supply or access.) Unfortunately, after this sterling analysis of the problem, the authors (of both the 60-page version and the 12-page "policy brief") back away from any coherent solution, instead delineating a bunch of questions in need of further research. It's as if they couldn't bear to acknowledge the obvious implication of their own study: make more choices available in Massachusetts, especially for poor and minority students. See for yourself by surfing to http://www.massinc.org/handler.cfm?type=2&target=School_Choice/schoolchoice_policybrief.pdf for the short edition and http://www.massinc.org/handler.cfm?type=2&target=School_Choice/schoolchoice_fullreport.pdf for the longer one.

American Association of School Administrators and National Association of State Boards of Education
April, 2003

This report identifies 15 NCLB issues that will have the greatest impact on rural and small schools. It's not light reading but if you're in such a district you'll likely want a copy. It's not free, though. To order, go to http://www.nasbe.org/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=N&Product_Code=NCLB&Category_Code=SAA.

Ruth Curran Neild, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
April 11, 2003

Do magnet schools "cream" students from other local schools, harming those left behind? That's the focus of this paper, which examines 1996 data from Philadelphia, which initiated a magnet system in the 1970s in response to desegregation mandates. Neild finds that neighborhood schools lose, on average, 10 percent of their students to magnet schools. There is great variation, though and, because magnets do take good students, it's actually the best of the neighborhood schools that lose out: one-quarter of all neighborhood schools are "significantly" affected, and all of these are medium- to high-achieving schools. Of the least-affected schools, most are struggling. As a result, the best schools take the largest hit from magnets even though they still remain at the top of the achievement heap. Interestingly, Neild found similar results with lottery magnets (those with random admissions policies); the best schools were affected much more than the worst schools. Such results suggest that those hoping to improve public schools need not fight magnet schools; their impact on struggling schools is minimal, at best. The report is interesting though brief, and does not examine some other potential impacts of magnets - on competition among schools, on improving student achievement, or on parent satisfaction, to name a few. You can find a copy at http://www.gse.upenn.edu/~rneild/Neighborhood high schools.Neild.doc.

Boston, like many school districts, faces a double whammy when it comes to teachers. Retention rates are low, with more than half of new teachers leaving the district or even the profession within three years. And more than half of all Boston teachers will soon be eligible for retirement. To head off this looming teacher crunch, a local foundation is underwriting a teacher training plan that mimics physician residency programs. Young teachers will work for a year under a master teacher toward certification in their specialty (and in special education), while taking classes one day a week. For that, they'll get $10,000 for living expenses and a no-interest loan to pay tuition expenses toward getting their master's at UMass-Boston. (The loan is forgiven if they teach for three years in a Boston public school.) Ed schools, however, appear to be minimally involved. The program will train 16 new teachers this year and hopes to expand to 120 by 2008. To get more info - or apply - go to http://www.bpe.org/whatsnew.aspx.

"New push to bring teachers to Boston," by Megan Trench, Boston Globe, May 16, 2003

Public schools in Oregon closed three weeks early this year and the Michigan legislature may allow that state's school systems to operate four days a week. Across the land, the "budget crunch" is hitting education hard.

To mitigate the impact on primary-secondary schooling, some states are whacking their higher education budgets, reducing the subsidy to public universities and raising tuitions, thus transferring more of the cost to students, families, and providers of financial aid.

Meanwhile, the largest single such aid provider, Uncle Sam, is beginning the laborious process of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA). At a May 13 hearing, House education committee chairman John Boehner cautioned colleges (and, implicitly, states) not to assume "that they can raise their prices until they are able to pay for what they need, and then rely on the federal government to step in and provide enough funding for every student to attend."

In fact, however, a strong case can be made for boosting public-college tuitions to reflect the true cost of attendance, then aiding students who need help with those fees. That rearrangement would level the higher education playing field between state colleges and private campuses. It would also concentrate public subsidies on those who need them rather than using the tax dollars of Detroit cab drivers to subsidize the children of Grosse Pointe stockbrokers enrolled in the University of Michigan. From the standpoint of both market efficiency and progressivity, that would be a good way to steer our policies.

Perhaps the cash crunch will cause some such steering to happen, but not because its wisdom has been widely accepted. Rather, it will occur in spite of outraged protests by higher education leaders who have made low tuition a sacred principle, the easier to fill some 15 million student slots on their campuses year after year.

It's common knowledge that, outside a few hundred selective schools, many of those slots get filled by any available warm body, regardless of academic prowess or preparation, that can muster the price of admission. So long as the price stays low, enormous numbers of people are available to enroll - even more so in a tight job market. Whether they will complete college is a matter best not investigated, nor is the question of what they'll learn after they matriculate. Those are things their institutions don't want to know too much about - and that they fiercely resist being probed by outsiders. They cite academic freedom and institutional differences as reasons why postsecondary education should not be held to account for its results in anything like the way K-12 education is in the era of No Child Left Behind. They fight all forms of external audit and assessment - a battle now raging in Florida, where the lay Board of Governors that oversees eleven state universities is considering a new higher-ed accountability system and campus presidents are having a hemorrhage.

It's barely possible that the forthcoming HEA reauthorization will take some action on this front. (A tiny step was taken last time around when ed schools were required to report their pass rates on state teacher exams.) Perhaps stirred by their own boldness in the name of K-12 accountability while wrestling with NCLB, a few members of Congress are murmuring about pressing for new forms of higher-ed accountability, too. Despite predictable apoplexy at One Dupont Circle, where college lobbyists hang out, astute observers of that sector know there's a problem. As Charles Miller, chairman of the University of Texas regents, said at the recent House hearing, "We don't know what's being taught and what's being learned." He went so far as to say that Congress might legitimately require colleges to provide a "data set" about their performance and acknowledged that better measures of student learning are needed, particularly for freshmen and sophomores. (My long-standing suggestion is to re-administer 12th grade NAEP exams to students at the end of their sophomore year to see whether they know any more than at the end of high school.)

Underlying all this is a painful truth: American education is so expensive in large measure because we pay for it twice. We send kids to high school to pick up the knowledge and skills they ought to have learned in elementary school. We send them to college to acquire a decent secondary education. And if we really need someone with a "higher" education, we're apt to look for people with postgraduate degrees.

How incredibly more efficient and economical it would be to get it right the first time - to expect people to have a proper elementary education by the conclusion of 8th grade, a serious secondary education by the end of 12th, and a bona fide college education by the time they collect their sheepskins.

In such a world - dream on, you say - fewer people would feel compelled to attend college because fewer employers would require college degrees, knowing that a high school diploma signified a full measure of knowledge, skills, and work habits. And if fewer people went to college, education wouldn't cost society as much, even though everyone would wind up knowing as much as (or more than) they do today. Better still, the savings might be used to improve teaching, invest in new technologies, make pre-school universal, and other education desiderata that we can't today afford because so many billions are needed for each level of the system to backfill what the previous level ought to have done.

Hold on to that thought as you observe the widening protests against high-stakes tests for high school exit - and the test-failure rates that trigger such protests. If K-12 education did it right the first time, many more young people would pass those tests. That they haven't yet passed (and in many states the passing score isn't very high) means someone needs to pay yet again to put them through the education process another time. How much better it would be for them - and the taxpayer - if they only had to do it once.

"Committee leaders launch effort to ensure accountability and quality in U.S. higher education," press release of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, May 13, 2003

The U.S. Department of Education announced on Tuesday that, because Georgia is not administering end-of-course tests this year, it has the dubious honor of being the first state to have funding withheld for failure to comply with the 1994 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Two years ago, the department granted Georgia a two-year extension to develop end-of-course tests with the understanding that they would be administered no later than June 30, 2003. Despite the impending deadline, state officials opted in March to delay test administration until 2004, violating their agreement with Washington. The 2001 reauthorization of ESEA, aqua No Child Left Behind, requires the department to withhold federal funding if states violate these timeline waivers or compliance agreements so, in a letter to Georgia school officials, Secretary Rod Paige said that the department would withhold 25 percent of the state's Title I administrative costs - more than $700,000. State school chief Kathy Cox insists that her office will contest Paige's decision, grumbling that Georgia's tests wouldn't have passed NCLB muster anyway.

"Feds yank funds over test delay," by James Salver, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 22, 2003

Responding to President Bush's call to improve Head Start, the 38-year-old federal program designed to increase educational opportunities for low-income preschoolers, House Republicans introduced a reform plan designed to close the school "readiness gap" that exists between low-income youngsters and their more affluent peers when they begin kindergarten. While the bill includes much of what Bush initially sought - an emphasis on academic standards and pre-reading, pre-mathematics, and English language acquisition skills, as well as loosening of federal control over the program - the School Readiness Act of 2003 (H.R. 2210) is both more specific than the White House plan and very different in parts. First, it outlines what states must do to win control over the program - guarantee level funding for Head Start and other preschool programs (even in a budget crunch), and meet a series of administrative requirements to prove their capacity to run the program. Also, while the White House plan would have shifted the program into the Department of Education, the House bill keeps Head Start in Health and Human Services, and maintains its health and nutrition services. According to the House Education Committee, the provisions of this bill reflect "the Head Start principles adopted recently by the bipartisan National Governors Association (NGA)."

"House Republicans offer plan to strengthen Head Start, discourage states from cutting early childhood education spending," press release from the Committee on Education and the Workforce, May 22, 2003

"GOP acts to remake Head Start," by Amy Goldstein, Washington Post, May 23, 2003

"House Republicans unveil effort to overhaul Head Start management," by Shawn Zeller, Government Executive, May 23, 2003

For the Gadfly's treatment of Bush's original proposal, see "Head Start Re-Start" at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#350.

Jeff Jacoby, columnist for the Globe, uses - of all things - the Jayson Blair scandal to jump off to a pretty boisterous condemnation of teacher unions. No one asked the journalists' union for its take on the unfolding controversy at the New York Times, notes Jacoby, "and that is as it should be," because that union exists to advance its members' economic self-interest, not act as a disinterested commentator on the state of journalism. The same rules ought to apply to teacher unions, he says, but don't. "When teachers' unions demand hefty increases in education spending or mandatory reductions in class size, they get a respectful hearing.... And yet their aims are no less self-serving and their interests no less mercenary than those of any other union," he says. Drawing from Sol Stern's recent book Breaking Free, reviewed recently in the Gadfly [http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=22#120], he notes that unions are aggressive participants in the political process but escape the scrutiny received by other political players. "They're not in business 'for the children,'" Jacoby concludes, dramatically. "They're in business for themselves."

"The bottom line for teachers' unions," by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, May 22, 2003

Standards and choice, say the authors of this very brief policy brief, should go hand-in-hand in raising educational achievement. Robert Holland and Dan Soifer of the Lexington Institute applaud Virginia schools for increasing the number of students who have passed the state's rigorous Standards of Learning (SOL) assessment tests. But pockets of underachievement remain and, because Virginia's charter law is so restrictive, these students have few options to find schools that can help them pass. Note: next week the Thomas B. Fordham Institute will release a report grading state charter authorizers in states with serious charter programs. Virginia's law is so meager the state didn't even get graded. Policy makers, take note.

"How a strong charter law can help Virginia's struggling students and schools," by Robert Holland and Dan Soifer, The Lexington Institute, May 27, 2003

Newsweek, playing catch-up to the influential if overrated college rankings in U.S. News & World Report, has a published the third edition of its list of the nation's 100 best public high schools, based only on rates of participation in AP and international baccalaureate classes. It's good to see a number of rural and low-income schools on the list - such as the Science Academy of South Texas (#8), which draws students from three poor counties along the Rio Grande. In a related article, Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews, who compiled the list, defends his methodology and his contention that high rates of AP/IB participation are sound indicators of a school's academic rigor.

"The 100 best high schools in America," by Jay Mathews, Newsweek, June 2, 2003

"Oakland school named the best," by Delores Patterson, Detroit News, May 26, 2003

"Inside the challenge index," by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, May 27, 2003

American Association of School Administrators and National Association of State Boards of Education
April, 2003

This report identifies 15 NCLB issues that will have the greatest impact on rural and small schools. It's not light reading but if you're in such a district you'll likely want a copy. It's not free, though. To order, go to http://www.nasbe.org/merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=N&Product_Code=NCLB&Category_Code=SAA.

Kathryn McDermott et. al., MassINC
2003

This report from MassINC's new Center for Education Research and Policy (co-sponsored by the Boston Foundation and the UMass Center for Education Policy) reviews the current array of education choices available to Bay State students and finds them "unevenly and inequitably distributed," meaning that they keep many poor children stuck in bad schools. The good news is that "at least one in four Massachusetts students are [sic] in a setting over which their families exercised some form of choice." (Almost a dozen different forms of education choice were tallied here.) The bad news is that most students' "ability to exercise school choice remains an accident of birth and is determined by family income and zip code." This is not too surprising, given that about two-thirds of Massachusetts choice options involve private/parochial schools and the state (which has a highly restrictive Blaine amendment) has nothing like vouchers. The upshot, say the authors, is widespread unmet demand for school choice, especially among poor and minority families, and the likelihood that this problem will worsen as school systems seek to comply with the choice provisions of No Child Left Behind. (NCLB's choice provisions will boost demand without substantially affecting supply or access.) Unfortunately, after this sterling analysis of the problem, the authors (of both the 60-page version and the 12-page "policy brief") back away from any coherent solution, instead delineating a bunch of questions in need of further research. It's as if they couldn't bear to acknowledge the obvious implication of their own study: make more choices available in Massachusetts, especially for poor and minority students. See for yourself by surfing to http://www.massinc.org/handler.cfm?type=2&target=School_Choice/schoolchoice_policybrief.pdf for the short edition and http://www.massinc.org/handler.cfm?type=2&target=School_Choice/schoolchoice_fullreport.pdf for the longer one.

Parent Leadership Associates
2003

A series of handy how-to's for parents and would-be ed reformers. The first volume explains the importance of collecting and analyzing data to help understand the achievement gap at a particular school, and outlines the blowback that reformers will likely get from administrators and teachers once they demand numbers - and start making them public. The second volume is an instructional guide on how to collect and analyze data. To order, go to http://www.plassociates.org/publications.html#gap or call 859-233-9849.

Patte Barth, The Education Trust
Winter 2003

Education Watch: Achievement, Attainment, and Opportunity from Elementary School Through College
The Education Trust
Winter 2003

These two reports from the Education Trust document the unequal educational treatment of low-income and minority students 49 years after Brown v. Board of Education. This subtle segregation takes the form not of separate schools but of different expectations, opportunities and levels of attainment. In the first report, author Patte Barth draws from recent large-scale economic and education studies to argue that, in order to prepare all students to succeed in college or the workplace, all students must be exposed to a rigorous, college prep curriculum. According to Barth, "the research is clear and compelling: the single biggest predictor of success in college is the quality and intensity of a student's high school curriculum - more significant than test scores or class rank. In fact, these factors trump socio-economic status as an influence on student success." Despite the proven importance of subjecting all students to a rigorous academic high school curriculum, the second report, Education Watch: Achievement, Attainment, and Opportunity from Elementary School through College, shows that "in almost every state minority students are enrolled in lower level classes, are assigned to less-qualified teachers, and are disproportionately placed in special education - or suspended from school entirely." The report includes summary reports with state-specific data on achievement gaps, opportunity gaps, and attainment gaps, as well as clear recommendations about what should be done to eliminate this subtle segregation. To get the first report, go to http://www.edtrust.org/main/main/reports.asp and click "more info" to download. The second report is at http://www.edtrust.org/main/documents/summaries2003/US_statesum.qxd.pdf, or you can go straight to the state summary data at http://www.edtrust.org/main/main/states.html.

Ruth Curran Neild, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
April 11, 2003

Do magnet schools "cream" students from other local schools, harming those left behind? That's the focus of this paper, which examines 1996 data from Philadelphia, which initiated a magnet system in the 1970s in response to desegregation mandates. Neild finds that neighborhood schools lose, on average, 10 percent of their students to magnet schools. There is great variation, though and, because magnets do take good students, it's actually the best of the neighborhood schools that lose out: one-quarter of all neighborhood schools are "significantly" affected, and all of these are medium- to high-achieving schools. Of the least-affected schools, most are struggling. As a result, the best schools take the largest hit from magnets even though they still remain at the top of the achievement heap. Interestingly, Neild found similar results with lottery magnets (those with random admissions policies); the best schools were affected much more than the worst schools. Such results suggest that those hoping to improve public schools need not fight magnet schools; their impact on struggling schools is minimal, at best. The report is interesting though brief, and does not examine some other potential impacts of magnets - on competition among schools, on improving student achievement, or on parent satisfaction, to name a few. You can find a copy at http://www.gse.upenn.edu/~rneild/Neighborhood high schools.Neild.doc.