The debate about "mainstreaming"--whether students are best served in "regular" settings instead of segregated, specialized ones--is typically reserved for discussions of special education (see below). But this week's Time magazine considers mainstreaming (and its opposite) in the context of America's most gifted children. In the middle of the debate is the year-old Davidson Academy, a privately endowed public school in Reno catering to high-IQ kids (generally over 160). It teaches forty-five 11- to 16-year-old prodigies, who moved to Nevada from all over the country and even overseas to be educated with other kids who are just as smart as they are. Their previous school experiences were frustrating, socially isolating, and of course boring. Now at Davidson, these students can form social networks, and they push each other to excel. But is running off to Reno really the only solution for highly gifted students? The article's author, John Cloud, isn't so sure. "The best way to treat [highly gifted students] is to let them grow up in their own communities--by allowing them to skip ahead at their own pace." Perhaps he's right, but that would require a sea change in the attitude of the public education system, which views grade-skipping skeptically. Of course, it once viewed the mainstreaming of special education kids skeptically, too.
"Are We Failing Our Geniuses?" by John Cloud, Time, August 16, 2007
True or false: NCLB considers teachers going through alternate routes to certification (like those employed by Teach For America) to be "highly qualified." False, charges a new lawsuit filed by "a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates" (with some encouragement, we're sure, from the education school establishment). It alleges that a five-year-old Department of Education regulation creates a loophole for alternate route programs that "defies the will of Congress" and "harms children." Really? The law itself is ambiguous on the question, at once allowing for alternate routes, while simultaneously banning any waivers of certification on an "emergency, temporary, or provisional basis." The problem is that alternate routes, by their very nature, don't confer certification on teachers until they complete a one or two year program--meaning they have to "waive" certification on a provisional basis. So what did Congress intend? Who knows, which is why the executive branch has regulatory authority to clarify such matters. This is far from an arcane issue, of course; if the Department were to lose this lawsuit, say goodbye to TFA, whose 5,000 corps members would be banned from teaching in the very high-need Title I schools they are trained to serve. (Could that really have been Congress's intent?) True or false: This lawsuit is really about preserving the education schools' monopoly.
"U.S. sued over teacher credentials," by Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2007
Someone call Jay Greene--officials are now naming schools after nonexistent historical figures! Our fourth president officially has a middle initial in Ogden, Utah, though it would be news to him. Seems someone submitted the name "James A. Madison" to the school board as a possible moniker for the district's new elementary school. How he or she came up with the wayward A is anyone's guess; perhaps it just felt right. After all, lots of big-name presidents have had middle initials: FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK, Richard M. Nixon, William Jefferson Clinton. Even Harry S. Truman had a middle initial (though the "S" wasn't short for anything. Apparently, he just liked the way it sounded.). Surely, the well-intentioned folks of Ogden may have reasoned, the man who wrote the Bill of Rights and helped draft the Declaration of Religious Freedom was important enough to carry a middle name. A local history teacher caught the error after School Board President Don Belnap missed it, despite majoring in history in college. "It's not that critical of an issue," he said. "We'll just take the A out." That happens this week, when the board votes to officially rescind Madison's ill-gotten middle initial.
"School asks, ‘Who is James A. Madison?', United Press International, August 18, 2007
Center on Education Policy
August 2007
It would be quite odd, to say the least, if states and districts were surveyed about whether or not they believed their students were making academic progress, and the responses were compiled and turned into a report. The reaction would be thus: "Who cares what the states and districts think. Why don't we just look at the actual data." This, alas, is the reaction one has to CEP's latest report about NCLB's "highly-qualified" teacher requirements. "More than half (56%) of responding states and two-thirds (66%) of districts reported that the NCLB teacher requirements have improved student achievement minimally or not at all," the report tells us. We also learn that the "NCLB highly qualified teacher requirements have not had a major impact on teacher effectiveness in the view of state and district officials." These are fine tidbits, but really--what purpose do they serve? And quite frankly, duh. Very few people who are actually familiar with the ill-conceived "highly qualified" mandate would ever presuppose that the designation carries any real meaning, much less any value to the classroom. It's often useful to know what those implementing NCLB think about it, but in this particular case it simply isn't. Find the report here.
U.S. Department of Education
July 2007
In the land of education innovation, it helps to know what works. And the What Works Clearinghouse's summer smorgasbord of studies reveals promising practices and programs--those having "positive" or "potentially positive" effects--in areas including dropout prevention, elementary school math, and early childhood education. Some of the winners include Kaplan SpellRead (a literacy program for readers who've fallen behind) and Peer Tutoring and Response Groups (collaborative learning to aid English Language Learners). Other initiatives have proven less effective, such as the Quantum Opportunity Program (a dropout prevention program for high schoolers). Researchers also note which specific parts of a given program are successful and which are not. For example, a literacy program might aid students' comprehension but show no effect on their fluency. Still, contrary to earlier WWC studies, many of the projects actually received positive ratings. (Perhaps now people will stop calling it the "Nothing Works Clearinghouse.") It's worth checking out here.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wants to know why people in positions of authority are keeping parents in the dark about the quality of their child's teacher, whom they will meet next week for the first time. "Many of those parents have no real idea of the teacher's capabilities," the editorial board explains. "They don't have access to the standardized test scores of that teacher's former classes, and they don't know how the teacher has been rated on evaluations. And that parental ignorance is deliberate." Tough but fair by our lights; after all, back in April we called for a "national database of information about individual teachers' instructional effectiveness, résumés, ratings by parents, and attendance records." (Florida is doing something similar to highlight teacher misconduct.) Yes, the devil's in the details; poorly implemented evaluation systems (such as Houston's) do nothing but create ill-will. But savvy parents don't just choose schools, they choose classrooms, and the education system should facilitate that process. Of course, as the AJC points out, such a "spotlight" might highlight "the dreaded teacher that nobody wants." That nobody wants, and that no child ought to have.
"Tell parents who good teachers are," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 13, 2007
We provoked a bit of a stir with last week's piece, featured in the Wall Street Journal and Gadfly, titled (by the Journal's editors) "Not By Geeks Alone." Most of that stir was intentional. We sincerely believe that today's STEM mania, combined with NCLB's narrow focus on basic reading and math (and test-taking) skills, combined with the newly enacted "competitiveness" bill that President Bush signed the other day, are having a deleterious effect on the American K-12 school curriculum--and very likely the college curriculum as well.
They are giving schools, teachers and students more reasons than ever--there were already too many--to neglect the humanities, to marginalize the arts, and to skimp on the social sciences. Moreover, they miss at least half of the true wellsprings of American competitiveness, which are not just skills but also knowledge, habits of mind, modes of inquiry, traits of character, among others. (For a longer exposition of this point, see our original essay and the longer Fordham volume that we edited, Beyond the Basics.)
The stir we did not anticipate came from friends worried that we had abandoned results-based accountability, turned against testing, and even declared war on standards.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. We support those important education reforms as ardently as ever. But we're also more mindful than ever of the truism that "what gets tested gets taught" and are alarmed that too narrow a conception of what schools are accountable for, by way of results, yields too narrow a definition of what teachers are responsible for imparting to their pupils. Good tests are efficient ways to determine how well students have learned what the curriculum sets forth. (That's why we admire the Advanced Placement exams, for example.) But bad tests, and an over-emphasis on test results at the expense of solid instruction across a balanced curriculum, can lead to damaging ends. There we stand.
In 2005, Demarcus Bolton learned that he was one of 20 Atlanta high-schoolers who would receive a $1,000 scholarship from City Councilman H. Lamar Willis's charitable foundation. Two years later, Bolton remains scholarship-less. After calling Willis's office repeatedly, he finally gave up. "I just let it go because I was tired of being lied to," he said. Bolton is also waiting on a Palm hand-held computer he was supposed to receive. Nikita Head, one of the 2005 winners, said, "It was like Oprah. ‘Everyone's getting a Palm Pilot!' We never got a Palm Pilot." Willis may have his hands full with more than angry 20-year-olds, though; he never registered his foundation as a charity, and the IRS never gave his organization a nonprofit designation. Investigations are underway. Willis's public relations manager quit last week, too, and issued a statement saying his boss "misrepresented facts." Which is flack-speak for "lied." Meanwhile, Bolton is doing fine, about to enter his third year at Savannah State University. Were he only able to check his email while talking to his girlfriend while planning a road trip to Poughkeepsie, he'd probably have already graduated.
"Student never received scholarship from city councilman's charity," by Cameron McWhirter, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 10, 2007
It's tough to know what to make of them, those who cling to the idea that social engineering will cure the ailments of public education's sickest parts. John Edwards belongs in that camp. His solution to academic torpor includes forced socioeconomic integration of classrooms and the creation of "a million housing vouchers over five years to help low-income families move to better neighborhoods."
The latest blow to the assumptions of Edwards and his ilk comes from a pair of reports, featured in the forthcoming issue of Education Next. The reports illustrate, among other things, that children of low-income families who moved from high-poverty neighborhoods to areas where they had "substantially fewer poor and substantially more educated neighbors" showed no academic improvement.
This reinforces two points. First: Socioeconomic integration is not a panacea for educational ills. Second: As professor Stefanie DeLuca writes in Ed Next, "poor families are not just wealthy families without a bankbook." A move to the suburbs may have many positive consequences for low-income children--indeed, it may be a necessary condition for certain individuals to emerge from poverty--but it is surely not sufficient to improve their educational performance.
If we want to see low-income students do better in school, we need to focus our efforts on schools, not on moving kids from Baltic Avenue to Boardwalk and everywhere in between. Poor parents need information about the good schools in their midst (information they're not currently receiving), and they need to understand that quality classrooms will make a positive impact on their children.
Authors of one of the Ed Next articles examined 1994-1997 data from the Moving to Opportunity program (MTO), which awarded housing vouchers to low-income families in five American cities: Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Only those families who lived in a public-housing development where the poverty rate was at least 40 percent were eligible to enter the MTO lottery (during the program's first year, each family who won an MTO voucher could use it to move only into neighborhoods where the poverty rate was lower than 10 percent).
During MTO's first four years, 4,248 families entered the lottery for vouchers. About 1,209 of them were offered unrestricted vouchers, which could be used anywhere, even in another high-poverty neighborhood. About 1,729 families were offered MTO vouchers, and 1,310 were offered no voucher (they became the control group).
MTO families moved to areas with poverty rates averaging 12.6 percent lower than those of the control families (not as dramatic a difference as the program's designers might have hoped). And MTO families sent their children to schools which, on average, scored only slightly higher on state exams but were more socioeconomically integrated than schools attended by control group students.
Did the MTO kids improve academically? No. The researchers put "the impact of moving with a restricted voucher at four-hundredths of a standard deviation increase in combined reading and math test scores, and the estimate is not statistically significant." Plopping kids into classrooms (and neighborhoods) that are socioeconomically integrated is not the way to boost academic achievement.
Between July 2003 and June 2004, DeLuca and colleagues interviewed MTO parents about their children's educational experiences, in part to determine why some parents who could've sent their students to decent suburban schools did not.
The responses suggest that many MTO parents simply underestimate the educational differences between quality schools and lousy ones. A respondent told DeLuca, "...you can send a hard head to a private school and it's not gonna make a bit of difference. You can send a good child to what you might think a not-so-good school and as long as they focus and pay attention it'll benefit them."
DeLuca concludes: "While neighborhood change could be a necessary condition to protect children and improve their schooling, it is not sufficient in light of the deep morass of issues that characterize the lives of the urban poor."
That's why all parents--urban poor or suburban wealthy--need information about the quality of their local schools, and they need it delivered in a simple, non-muddled way. Inner-city parents should especially be targeted by disseminators of such information. Such parents must be shown that despite their years of enduring mostly nasty neighborhood schools, quality classrooms are possible and do make a difference.
The ongoing social shuffle is a dance whose steps grow tiresome. Time to stop the music and get down to business.
As Gadfly recently noted , prospects for Congressional bi-partisanship for the renewal of NCLB are eroding. George Miller and Buck McKeon appear to hold very different views--this month, anyway--as to what's wrong, what's right, and what needs fixing, and how NCLB 2.0 should differ from the first iteration. This despite Miller's stated intention to bring an NCLB reauthorization bill to the House floor next month.
Conventional wisdom holds that this landmark law cannot be revamped--though it could probably be extended as is, just to keep the money flowing--absent a fairly broad consensus. Miller and Pelosi could indeed bring a bill before the House and possibly ram it through on a near-straight party line vote (though such a move would likely provoke more Democratic defections than GOP supporters) but it would come unglued in the Senate, where it's essential nowadays to have 60 firm votes for anything controversial. Which this would surely be.
The United States Congress these days is a near-to-dysfunctional institution. It accomplishes little of anything and less of importance. Call me cynical after too many years inside the Beltway but it appears to me that, on any but the most routine matters, lawmakers now act only when at least one of three (overlapping) conditions is met-and not always then. (1) There's a bona fide national crisis (e.g., 9/11, Katrina). (2) There's a huge public outcry. Or (3) there's a full-fledged Washington-style scandal needing to be redressed.
NCLB satisfies none of those conditions. Yes, a flock of educators, a pride of politicians, and a bestiary of policy wonks are unhappy with it, but nobody could claim that a crisis exists. Most people still have scant awareness of it, and there's surely no clamor from the public at large. And it has no Washington-style scandal associated with it. Sure, one could argue that the variability and slackness of state standards is an education scandal, that the unkept promise of public-school choice is a scandal, etc., but that's not the same as saying that someone has walked off with the payroll or is profiteering at children's expense. (To see a true, action-forcing scandal at work, observe what's been happening--and what's been revealed--about college student loans, which may finally lead to reauthorization--four years late--of the Higher Education Act.)
But Congressional dysfunction isn't the whole story. There's also perilously little agreement on what ails NCLB and how to cure it. Indeed, I submit that today there is near-consensus on precisely one point: the desirability of some sort of "growth model" for determining AYP, i.e. the proposition that schools' performance should be judged by examining the additional academic "value" that they add to their pupils rather than (or in addition to) the absolute number of kids reaching a single fixed standard. Here, too, however, even if there's rough agreement at the conceptual level, widespread discord still prevails on just about every element of how growth models should be designed and implemented--and how many places are capable of doing it.
Regarding other aspects of NCLB, there's no shortage of advice. A five foot shelf of books, studies, reports, commission recommendations, etc. is rapidly accumulating. (I plead guilty to having helped contribute half a linear foot or so.) Its very amplitude attests not only to the length and complexity of the law but also to the disputed nature of what, exactly, is awry in NCLB 1.0 and what are the essential attributes of version 2.0. Even more important, underlying all the technical specifics are four immense (my granddaughter would say "hunormous") dilemmas that go to the heart of the matter.
Is NCLB's goal itself naïve and unrealistic? Politicians pledge that no child will be left behind, yet I don't know a single educator who seriously thinks 100 percent of U.S. children can become "proficient" (according to any reasonable definition of that term) by 2014 in reading and math. Indeed, exemptions have already been made for seriously disabled youngsters. In truth, getting American kids from their current 30 percent or so proficient level (using NAEP standards) to 70 or 80 percent would be a remarkable, nation-changing achievement. Yet I can't imagine a lawmaker conceding that this would be worth doing. The first thing hurled back at him would be "which 20 percent of the kids don't matter to you?"
Is the program upside down? It's no surprise that we at Fordham think NCLB 1.0 inverted a fundamental design principle: Congress opted to be tight with regard to means and loose with regard to ends--trusting every state to set its own standards while micro-managing any number of measurement systems and highly prescriptive sequences of school and district interventions. Far better to promulgate a single national standard and assessment system, then trust states, districts and educators to devise their own means of getting there on their own timetables. But half of Congress will recoil in horror from the freedom and flexibility implied therein while the other half will be put off by uniform standards.
Is the architecture usable for this purpose? As Gadfly has noted before, in 1965 it made sense, indeed was practically inevitable, for Uncle Sam to distribute his new education dollars via the traditional structures of state education departments and local school systems. Four decades later, however, the main focus of federal policy is altering the behavior and performance of those very institutions in ways they don't want to be altered (while also still distributing dollars to and through them). It's beyond imagining that the old multi-tiered architecture can satisfactorily handle the new challenges. Yet nobody is thinking creatively about alternative structures by which NCLB's goals might more effectively be pursued.
Can the federal government successfully pull off anything as complex and ambitious as NCLB in so vast and loosely coupled a system as American k-12 education? Unfortunately, the executive branch is as dysfunctional as the legislative. It can't keep our levees strong, our bridges standing, or our airplanes on schedule, much less provide health care to the needy or root out terrorists in our midst. Sure, we ask it to do too much and we're terrible at prioritizing. That said, however, let's face the reality that education is even harder to change because it's so decentralized and so many of its street-level bureaucrats can ignore, veto, or undermine the plans of distant rulemakers.
So long as these monster questions lack agreed-upon answers, I don't see much hope for an NCLB 2.0 that's markedly better than NCLB 1.0.