They take their coffee seriously in Washington State, and school district employees are no exception. The Seattle Public Schools administration building has a self-supporting deli that offers espresso drinks brewed from a $6,000 machine (which, according to spokesmen, has paid for itself). The Tacoma district admin building has espresso carts, which are run by special-education students, who gain work experience and barista skills. But the Edmonds School District takes the cake. It recently purchased a $15,000 espresso machine for its administrative offices. The coffee doesn't come free; if employees want a doppio, they have to pay for it. But the prices are cheaper than Starbucks, and thirsty staff members don't have to leave the building for a quality cup. Revenue funds the food-service operation (and will also pay for a certain $15,000 coffee pot). Gadfly, a caffeine addict, wonders: Is the Edmonds School District hiring? 

"District's new espresso maker brews up a few questions," by Lynn Thompson, Seattle Times, June 6, 2007

Just last week, Gadfly encouraged Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) administrators to buck up, fix the scoring problems that plagued their 2006 reading assessments, and keep the faith (see here). Now Ron Matus, an education reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, offers his own defense of standardized assessments in a thoughtful opinion piece. Through his reporting, Matus has seen high school kids who "for all intents and purposes couldn't write" go on to pass their courses and graduate with ease. A teacher Matus respects once told him that he gave a student--a 17-year-old who was reading at an elementary-school level--a B just for trying. "It's complicated," the instructor said. Such experiences have led Matus to conclude that teachers may not always know best, that grades are often meaningless, and that maybe external tests aren't such a bad thing. They might actually help expose poor student performance and demand some accountability from teachers and school leaders who were, before testing, sometimes willing to let kids slip through the cracks. Well said, Ron.

"FCAT tests us; so what?," by Ron Matus, St. Petersburg Times, June 3, 2007

Center on Education Policy
June 2007

The first thing you should know about this blockbuster report from the Center on Education Policy (CEP) is that its title is a bit misleading. Yes, the study examines student achievement and gap-closing trends since NCLB's enactment, but no, that's not the question that matters most. Because what most policymakers and analysts actually want to know is whether the landmark federal law "works"--has it caused achievement to increase or decline. Here the good people at CEP are honest: "It is very difficult, if not impossible, to determine the extent to which these trends in test results have occurred because of NCLB." So with that caveat in mind, let us return to our regularly scheduled review. The news is basically positive: student achievement on most state reading and math tests has gone up since 2002 and achievement gaps have narrowed. Gains are particularly impressive in elementary school math. Students have posted less progress on state reading tests and in middle school. Such patterns are consistent with recent findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, though states are reporting greater progress on their own tests than on NAEP. This raises a critical question: Can we be sure that state tests haven't gotten easier since 2002? For an answer, stay tuned for a report of our own, due out in a few months. Meanwhile, check out the CEP study here.

National Center for Education Statistics
June 2007

At nearly 350 pages, this year's Condition of Education is shorter than last year's. And though some persistent problems remain (dropout numbers, for example, are still murky, and the data are frequently two years old, or more), NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider and his crew continue to refine and improve this hallmark report. The 2007 edition contains a special section on high school course taking, including an in-depth look at the explosion in students taking AP courses. Their number doubled between 1997 and 2005, with the greatest gains made by Hispanics (up 213 percent) and blacks (up 177 percent). On the down side, while white and Asian scores on AP tests remained fairly constant over those years (hovering around 3 out of a possible 5), Hispanic scores fell from 3.1 in 1997 to 2.5 in 2005. (Are schools forcing more students into AP classes than are able to do the work, or are there too few good teachers to teach them? Or both?) Other information that caught this reviewer's eye:

• The amount of time spent on homework by high school sophomores reportedly rose between 1980 and 2002, and so, too, did the percentage of students coming to school without their homework completed.
• Overall spending per child is up, with most of the new money going to capital outlays and interest (which makes some sense, because the student population is projected to rise every year from now to 2016).
• Among private-school attendees (roughly 10 percent of K-12 students), Catholic schools still attract the most students, though their numbers have been shrinking as "Christian" schools are growing.

There's much more of note, of course, so you should download a copy for yourself. Get it here.

National Center for Education Statistics
May 2007

As conscientious Gadfly (and newspaper) readers know, the 2006 NAEP U.S. history exam showed some recent gains in students' understanding of the nation's past. Not so for civics. Although the share of fourth-graders who possess at least "basic" knowledge of civics inched up from 69 percent in 1998 to 73 percent in 2006, for eighth- and twelfth-graders the trend line is flat. Why did fourth-graders (who rarey study civics anyway) improve while older students didn't? Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews quotes experts who say that "Higher scores in fourth-grade history and civics go along with the recently reported higher [fourth-grade] reading scores." The Department of Education is touting this logic, too. But nobody seems able to explicate why history scores rose in eighth- and twelfth-grade but civics outcomes didn't budge. Still, the need for progress is obvious. Consider: only 43 percent of twelfth-graders "described the meaning of federalism in the U.S.," and just 28 percent of eighth-graders "explained the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence." For more depressing news, see the report here.

Can technology turn well-meaning but ill-prepared teachers into effective instructors? A new breed of education business is betting on it. While none claim that they are "teacher proofing" the classroom, several are building tools that aim to turn mere mortals into excellent teachers.

One class of products seeks to make teachers more efficient and productive. Wireless Generation, for example, offers software that turns handheld computers into diagnostic tools that quickly identify gaps in students' reading and mathematics skills. Data are instantaneously uploaded to a program that helps instructors analyze student performance over time and personalize their instructional strategies for each child.

Other products aim to enhance classroom instruction directly. For decades this has been the Holy Grail of the education technology industry. And for years the market has offered products like lesson-plan banks, tools to align lessons to state standards, and more recently, subscriptions to digital content providers (such as Discovery Education) that allow instructors to embed high-quality video, music, or graphics into their teaching. But early applications of this technology forced the teacher to play writer, director, and producer for each set of digitally enhanced lessons. That's a lot to expect from the average teacher and reinforces the inefficient practice of asking every teacher to reinvent the wheel.

Enter companies such as Agile Mind, which produces fully developed lessons in math and science that are rich with visualizations and simulations. This new generation of content providers shows potential, says Adam Newman, a vice president at the consulting firm Eduventures, because their products are "crafted with an understanding of the challenges and constraints of the classroom."

Some of the most important parts of the education process happen after the school bell rings, when teachers grade student homework, papers, and tests. Why can't English essays, for example, be zipped off electronically to be marked up and graded overnight by English majors or graduate students around the country (or even around the world), then handed back to the student the next day? A company called EduMetry is pursuing exactly this business for large-scale courses at the higher education level. EduMetry works with professors to create common grading rubrics; tests are graded online and feedback is provided electronically, creating a digital record of student work along the way. K-12 teachers might like similar homework-grading help, and students would receive feedback faster than they can from their teacher alone.

All of these products and services cost money--money that has to be squeezed out of an education system that plows almost all of its resources into personnel. Of course, there is another way. As our own Chester E. Finn Jr. first explained, in the past half-century our K-12 public education student population has grown 50 percent while our teacher corps has grown nearly 300 percent, largely in pursuit of smaller classes. If the size of our teacher force had merely kept pace with student growth and we spent the extra money attracting more-accomplished individuals to the field, today's average teacher salary would be close to $100,000 per year.

If teachers unions find the new technologies demeaning or threatening, perhaps they will finally get serious about working to raise teacher pay, compensate high performers accordingly, and give up their small classes in return. Should education technology push our system to finally choose teacher quality over teacher quantity, it will have a transformative effect indeed. But as long as it costs less money and political will to enhance legions of mediocre teachers than it would to compensate fewer highly talented ones, these technologies should find a market.

This essay first appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Education Next.

Respectable historians have long warned students against "presentism," defined by Word Spy as "the application of current ideals, morals, and standards to historical figures and events." But what about "present-tense-ism," as illustrated by a recent Gallup Poll and described in Diane Ravitch's latest op-ed? Pollsters asked Americans to name the greatest president ever: an astounding 25 percent of Democrats picked Bill Clinton, while a whopping 32 percent of Republicans selected Ronald Reagan. Ravitch writes that to suggest these men "were ‘greater' presidents than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt is bizarre." Bizarre, but perhaps unsurprising, considering Americans' feeble knowledge of U.S. history. While the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress showed steady gains in the subject (see here), more than half of all twelfth graders were still "below basic." The consequences of this knowledge vacuum are severe. "We can't have thoughtful public discussions of issues," Ravitch writes, "when the public is so woefully uninformed about the past."

"First, Get the Knowledge," by Diane Ravitch, New York Sun, May 25, 2007

Brett Bradshaw doesn't like traditional exams. "Standardized tests are just snapshots that measure mostly the ability to recall facts," he told the Los Angeles Times. Bradshaw--director of strategic communications for the Coalition of Essential Schools--prefers evaluating student knowledge through exhibitions, i.e., oral presentations. His organization, which promotes exhibitions, has 250 member campuses, some of which actually do a good job teaching their students. At one of them, Los Angeles's Wildwood School, which charges $24,425 per year in tuition, Joshua Koenig recently gave his graduation presentation about the challenges of trading stock options and climbing Mt. Rainier with his father. Koenig will attend the University of Michigan next year, where stories about mountain journeys may not cut it in Geology 101; Koenig has never studied for a real final exam. If some parents want to pay $100,000 for their students to attend high schools without tests, so be it. But this exhibition stuff, while suitable for some subjects, is not a good basis for evaluating students. It's been around forever, doesn't work at scale, and adds little of value to the larger education-reform debates. Someone should alert the Times.

"More schools are ditching final exams," by Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2007

Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty can't seem to catch a break in his quest to take over the city's notoriously bad public schools. After assiduously massaging egos and playing urban politics so that the City Council would approve his takeover bid, Fenty has hit snag after snag. He had to overcome meddling legislators from Maryland and Louisiana (see here) and his own staff's slipshod school-plan plagiarism (see here). But now, more hurdles. The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics ruled in favor of a group of residents who want to force a referendum on Fenty's plan. If the group can collect 20,000 signatures by June 12th (a monumental undertaking), a special election on the mayor's school takeover will be set for August. Just another way to stall meaningful reform of the District's classrooms. The tribulations surrounding this process have one upside, though: they reveal all too plainly how the city's blundering bureaucrats, multiple bosses, and red tape stifle promising ideas and kill innovation. Anyone who wondered how D.C. schools could remain so lousy for so long now has an answer.

"Activists Push to Allow Vote on School Plan," by David Nakamura, Washington Post, May 30, 2007

"Schools Takeover Could be Delayed," by David Nakamura, Washington Post, May 24, 2007

The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) is the centerpiece of one of the best state accountability systems in the country, but it's far from perfect. Education officials in Tallahassee discovered last week that third-grade reading scores from the 2006 FCAT were inflated by human scoring errors, allowing many students who should have been held back to move on to fourth grade. Predictably, the glitch has fanned the anti-testing flames. Dan Gelber, Democratic leader of the Florida House, said that this error "confirms the danger of overemphasizing a single test." Bob Schaeffer, education director of the ill-named FairTest, agreed, saying that "Florida is a serial mis-user of test scores," and that accountability programs should weigh exam results against other evaluative factors. Gadfly's advice: Straighten out the kinks in FCAT scoring, make sure the mistakes don't happen again, and get back to providing Florida's kids a strong curriculum and holding them, and their schools, accountable for learning it.   

"Last year's problem overshadows rising 2007 FCAT scores," by Bill Kaczor, Associated Press, May 23, 2007

"Despite mistakes, FCAT isn't going away," by Nirvi Shah and Tania deLuzuriaga, Miami Herald, May 25, 2007