No, not Reverend Wright, but our favorite ed school professor, Bill Ayers.

* Friend of Barack Obama

An article in yesterday's Washington Post reports on Grover Whitehurst's efforts as founding director of the Institute of Education Sciences to improve the quality and impact of education research.

The No Child Left Behind Act, in which the phrase "scientifically based research" appears 111 times, according to Whitehurst, has undoubtedly upped the demand for more and better education data. But the whole enterprise has proved too politically sensitive for Congress to be able to do it well:

Whitehurst, who in late 2002 became the founding director of the department's Institute of Education Sciences, has discovered that his vision for the role of research sometimes conflicts with the turbulent forces of politics, policy and public opinion.

... [One] proposal called for recruiting double the number of students that Upward Bound is able to serve. Half would participate in the program, and half would become a control group. Researchers would track the progress of both groups.

Scientifically, it was sound. Politically, it was a non-starter.

Critics said it was unethical to introduce at-risk kids to Upward Bound's opportunities if officials knew they couldn't participate. At a February hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) called the evaluation design "discriminatory."

After lawmakers proposed legislation to halt the study, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings agreed to scrap it.

That's just one example of how lawmakers-turned-program evaluators have mucked things up. For a gorier picture, see Fordham's recent report on the Reading First scandal. That program was designed to channel tax dollars to primary-reading programs based on scientific research. What happened? The pot of public money attracted a swarm of vultures who pecked and clawed each other mercilessly, bringing down the program with them.

What's surprising is that so many people continue to believe that these embarrassments stem from a failure of political will, rather than the inherent obstacles posed by, as the Post puts it, the "turbulent forces of politics, policy and public opinion." We always think we'll do better next time around, when our guys or gals are in office.

But lawmakers have proven again and again (and it's only natural, given the dynamics of representative government) that the voices of constituents and interest groups are louder than the voice of science. For another great example of this, see Michael Pollan's wildly-popular New York Times essay on how the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition was hijacked by the meat and dairy lobbies and consequently released "scientifically-based" nutrition guidelines that have proven remarkably wrong-headed and disastrously influential on our eating habits.

The Washington Post editors turn in a nice defense of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program today. As they point out, it will be tough to get Congress to approve the $18 million set aside for the program, especially considering the fierce opposition of D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.

But the good news, frankly, is that Mayor Adrian Fenty, a Democrat, is going to the Capitol to defend the program--i.e., to defend vouchers. For an issue propelled primarily by the fuel of party affiliation, it's extremely heartening to see a political leader have the guts to say, "Hey, this idea has enormous potential for turning around a district in shambles, and I'm going to stand up for it, simple as that."

(Cory Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark and a man of seemingly boundless integrity and conviction, has also publicly supported vouchers. Let's hope the trend continues.)

In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn picks up where Kathryn Jean Lopez left off , arguing that McCain could win African American votes from Obama (or Clinton) if he would take "this (school choice) campaign into the heart of our cities--and gave a little straight talk about the scandal that their public-school systems represent in this great land of opportunity."

He's surely correct that McCain doesn't share Obama's problem, that he "cannot offend the teachers unions that are arguably the most powerful constituents" in the Democratic party. If he were to take this opening, the question is whether it would be seen as a sincere effort to help the inner cities and their children--as the efforts of mayors Cory Booker and Adrian Fenty are seen--or rather as an attack on public schools. Given that editorial boards are rarely this supportive of school choice , one wonders.

P.S. McGurn also mentions Fordham's Catholic schools report , which we may or may not have mentioned on this blog before .

I can't comment with much authority on the legal details of the case, but if you're into ed policy surely it's worth knowing that "a federal judge has dismissed the last of four claims in Connecticut's challenge to the federal No Child Left Behind law."

The Associated Press reports:

A Coffee County High School substitute teacher has been arrested in what police say appears to be a scheme to bilk money from students promised a trip to Disney World.

Police charged 39-year-old Christy Wise with theft by conversion after they say she collected more than $7,400 from students for their senior trip but never booked the reservations.

Nearly 50 students toting suitcases and bags lined up outside Coffee County High on Friday waiting to start their vacation, but the bus never came and Wise never showed up. Police believe Wise never had any intentions of scheduling the trip.

It's too bad that Lucky Liam is spending a few days being a bon vivant in Montreal because it would have been fun to see his reaction to this story out of California. The Sacramento Bee reported yesterday on a school that would have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind were it not for the fancy footwork of its principal:

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn't count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

"You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble."

"Go white"? No doubt Liam would say something witty like, "When you divvy up the American people by race, eventually you divvy up individual Americans by race." And he would have explained, as he did in a National Review Online piece, that he is one of the only education analysts in the country who deeply dislikes NCLB's policy of disaggregating test score data by race. That would have sparked a debate about the merits of said policy that would have gone something like this:

Me: Touch??, Liam, but let us not overreact to the actions of a single misguided principal. Just like we don't abandon testing because a handful of teachers cheat on the test, neither should we abandon holding schools accountable for the performance of all of their groups of students just because Mr. Wong divvied kids up by race. The real travesty is that the U.S. Department of Education allows California (and Florida) to deem schools as A-OK even if 99 African-American or Hispanic or low-income students in a school fail the state test.

Liam: But Mr. Wong was not alone. The Sac Bee found 80 schools in California that "got out of trouble" with NCLB by changing students' racial identities. Surely this is happening in the other 49 states too. And it's hardening America's obsession with race. If a school is going to contact parents about their child, shouldn't it be about something other than the color of their skin? WWMLKD?

Me: Martin Luther King would have staged a protest outside Mr. Wong's school. He wouldn't have backed away from the most important civil rights law to come along in a generation.

This would have continued all day, no doubt. As I said, it's too bad Liam's in Montreal.

We appreciate Eduwonk Andy's nice plug of our Catholic schools report, and agree with him that public funding should come in return for some "substantial reciprocal obligations on the part of parochial schools," which he says "they have thus far resisted." We suspect he means the release of test score data, which Scott Hamilton addresses in our report's introduction:

In an increasingly competitive environment for schools, and with the imperfect but rich array of school information about public schools now available, the dearth of student achievement data and other information about Catholic schools represents either archaic (possibly even smug or defensive) secrecy or a grievous failure to observe how the education world has changed since the days when parishioners could simply be admonished to send their children to a Catholic school. In the era of No Child Left Behind, Catholic schools must make a commitment to measure their performance and make the results (and much more) available to one and all. Arguably, they should provide more such information than their public school counterparts.

I'm not so sure that parochial schools would resist this, however, if real money were on the table. At least when I played a bit part in implementing the District of Columbia's federally-funded school voucher program, it became clear to me that the Catholic schools were desperate enough for the dollars that they would have done virtually anything, including making all of their test score data public. It was the secular independent schools (like Georgetown Day) that protested loudly about any "intrusion" into their affairs and which threatened not to participate if they had to take certain tests and come under the light of transparency.

So Congress and the U.S. Department of Education had a choice: force the "transparency" issue and create a program with nothing but Catholic schools, or repent on testing and create a program with a broad-based group of schools. We chose the latter; I suspect those on the left would make the same choice, too.

I don't like the way this debate is evolving.

Sunday's New York Times Magazine features an article on K-12 arts education. The piece sets out to refute Obama's evidently misleading claims that teaching the arts leads to improved student performance on standardized tests.

There is indeed a correlation between, for example, how many years students spend in arts classes and their SAT scores; more art, higher scores. But that doesn't prove that it's the added exposure to the arts that boosts verbal or math performance. Another study shows that students who take more courses in any subject do better on the SAT. Meanwhile, a British study found the opposite: the more arts classes students took, the worse they did on their national exams. A more plausible explanation, Winner speculates, may be that academically motivated students in the U.S. gravitate to the arts, eager to show supercompetitive colleges they aren't just grinds who do well on their SATs. In England, it's weaker students who are steered onto the arts track.

Fair enough, but there are more important reasons to teach kids about art and music. As Checker and (Fordham board member) Diane Ravitch argued in the Wall Street Journal last year, the breadth of our curricular offerings allows us to "acquire qualities and abilities that aren't easily 'outsourced' to Guangzhou or Hyderabad."

Indeed, the iPod, Google, Hollywood--these world-beating American icons sprouted from fertile minds that, though they certainly benefited from some technical know-how, would never have found proper nourishment in a drill-and-kill, math-and-science-only environment. Are we really so obtuse as to think that it's not worth teaching the arts unless it boosts our SAT scores?

(Read more on this in the Fordham report Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children. An essay by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is especially stirring.)