In the latest City Journal, Kay Hymowitz discusses Bill Cosby's parenting-power crusade among poor African-Americans and links it to the failure of government social welfare programs to close the education and economic gaps. A typical Cosby rant: "Proper education has to begin at home. . . . What we need now is parents sitting down with children, overseeing homework, sending children off to school in the morning, well fed, rested, and ready to learn." To Hymowitz, parents who do engage in these activities have signed up for what she calls "The Mission" - that is, the conscious attempt on the part of parents to develop the talents, interests, and personal character of children such that they are freed to pursue their bliss. She bluntly states the problem: "Poor black parents rear their children very differently from the way middle-class parents do, and even by the time the kids are four years old, the results are extremely hard to change." Hymowitz claims that underclass parents fail to sign up for The Mission, and while they may have the requisite parenting skills, they lack "the motivation to bring them to bear in a consistent, mindful way." Gadfly is probably unqualified to judge the cultural claims Hymowitz is making and is uncomfortable anyway with the logical conclusion of some of them (i.e., some kids are damaged goods by age four; there's nothing schools can do about it). But we would certainly agree that, while proper education must start in the home, such broad changes take time and prodigious effort. So in the meantime, the fact that these kids are showing up at school already behind does suggest that high-quality pre-school for lower-income children can be an important (if not fully effective) stopgap. (For more on that topic, see this recent Fordham publication, here). Parenting is key, but so is high-quality schooling.
"What's holding black kids back?" by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal, Spring 2005
Middle schools, like middle children, are just plain misunderstood. There is pretty clear evidence from the recent NAEP results that middle schools are where academic achievement in America falters and begins its accelerating decline, as the Los Angeles Times argues in a cracker-jack editorial this week. To our way of thinking, this is because middle schools (as author Cheri Pierson Yecke will argue in a forthcoming Fordham report) are usually places where academic rigor and achievement take a back seat to "personal development," social consciousness, and the inculcation of egalitarian principles. Middle schoolism is about curing the middle school student of his or her supposed dysfunction - which doesn't leave much time for learning (which the most radical proponents of middle schoolism believe is beyond the ability of early adolescents anyway). These nonsensical beliefs have become conventional wisdom. So, for example, Julia Steiny argues in the Providence Journal this week that middle schools are rife with bullying, and runs through the litany of ills to which middle schoolers are allegedly prey: cutting, purging, depression, suicide, homicide. . . . Clearly, the middle school is a veritable chamber of horrors. And in Delaware, the state department of education is blaming the abysmal results on state math tests on, yes, those darn middle schoolers, who are just more interested in "the right clothes, dating, and being seen at the mall - which doesn't leave a lot of time for algebra." Well, yes, from time immemorial, parents and teachers have known that early adolescents are surly, inconstant, and inattentive - but also can be engaged, creative, and energetic if someone gives them something to care about. We used to be able to educate these kids. Gadfly's answer to the problems of middle schools? Give them something serious to do!
"The neglected middle classes," Los Angeles Times, July 26, 2005
"The basics of school bullying," by Julia Steiny, Providence Journal, July 24, 2005
"For many kids, math is a low priority," by Cecilia Le, Delaware News Journal, July 24, 2005
Merit pay for teachers has gotten a lot of play recently (for examples, see here). Without a doubt, the principle that some teachers ought to get paid more than others has gained political currency around the country. More and more politicians - generally a risk-averse group - are coming out four-square behind merit pay, even if it means taking on the unions.
While I'm certainly glad that merit pay is gaining ground as the "right" thing to do, right doesn't always make might. The groundswell of public support could quickly seep back into the cracks depending upon how we proceed from here. Merit pay could be doomed to failure unless governors support the careful experimentation that's needed to solve some of this reform idea's great dilemmas.
Structuring merit pay well is hard to do. The systems need both to be fair and to be hefty enough actually to impact a talented teacher's decision to enter or leave the profession, i.e. to alter behavior. As we've seen in California - where the unions have formed a formidable bloc in opposition to Governor Schwarzenegger's attempt to reform teacher tenure and institute merit pay - our collective naivet?? combined with unrestrained enthusiasm plays right into the hands of groups opposed to change.
The thorny problem of how best to determine a teacher's effectiveness - the only fair basis for deciding who gets merit pay - has by no means been worked out to the degree required for wide scale adoption. Challenges include:
- Value-added measures of student learning, while certainly promising and the most reliable option on the table, cannot be used to measure the effectiveness of teachers who work with very young children, in high schools, and in non-tested subjects like art, music and history.
- Evaluations by principals or peers, when done with care and consistency, do correlate highly with student learning gains. However, this method must overcome a long history of ill-designed instruments and weak training of evaluators, not to mention widespread teacher suspicions that principals will play favorites.
- Letting the teacher decide for him or herself what goals to achieve, as Denver has done, brings its own challenges - both in administering a program predicated on unique goals for each teacher, and in the possibility that a teacher's goals may not align with those of the school, school system, state or taxpayers.
Though these problems appear daunting, policy makers must tackle them. Some experimentation is surely in order as well as some pilot programs coupled with rigorous evaluations. Meanwhile, we do know some things that offer useful parameters for moving forward:
- Merit pay needs to be based on multiple factors. It should always include some measure of student achievement, but it also needs to include evaluations by school principals and senior faculty. It's neither workable nor even fair to base a teacher's income on a one-shot test. Critics have a valid point here.
- Merit pay bonuses must be large enough to persuade teachers to do something they might not otherwise choose to do. The $1,500 bonuses currently offered by a number of states and districts are likely inadequate. My hunch is that 10-20 percent of base salary is more like it.
- Merit pay programs should acknowledge individual successes, not just school-wide achievements. In other words, all teachers in the same school should not receive the same bonus - though perhaps all should receive some bonus. For good reasons why, see this recent study by Eric Hanushek, Steve Rivken, John Kain, and Daniel O'Brien(http://www.nctq.org/nctq/research/1112806467874.pdf).
- Schools must help weak teachers achieve. Professional development funds ought to be directed at supporting teachers as they gain the skills they need to qualify for bonuses.
- States and districts require a long-term strategy for sustaining any merit pay program. Too often, teachers are promised bonuses that prove short lived, ending as soon as the first budget crunch. One idea worth pursuing is to persuade teachers in experimenting schools to give up their automatic step increases, contributing these funds to the bonus package. Tweaking the existing uniform salary schedule is a promising way for merit pay packages to survive the test of time.
- The resources needed to do merit pay right for all schools statewide do not exist. For now, it would be better to allocate resources to high-need districts than to spread limited resources too thin.
The teaching profession has no choice but to remedy an outmoded pay structure that is woefully insensitive to current labor force realities. Daunting though the challenges appear, there's no question that it can be done. Will it be perfectly fair? No system is - but the system we're saddled with now is remarkably unfair to teachers and, even more importantly, runs counter to what works best for kids.
Kate Walsh is president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (www.nctq.org). This editorial is adapted from a recent edition of the Teacher Quality Bulletin.
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
July 2005
Homeownership is the American Dream, but for many charter schools finding a permanent place to lay down roots is more like a nightmare. Lenders and real estate brokers get nervous about charter schools because the market is so new, the charters relatively short-lived, and the risk of default unknown. This creates what the Kauffman Foundation, in this fine and refreshingly hardheaded report, calls a circular dilemma: The greatest cause of charter school closure is failure to secure an adequate building, yet the risk of closure is the greatest obstacle to charter schools securing an adequate building. You couldn't plan a more perverse catch-22. In fact, though many lenders take as gospel reports that 10 percent of charter schools have closed, Kauffman notes that many of those schools simply "changed organizational structure, and continued to occupy and pay on their buildings." Kauffman estimates that the real closure rate is more like 6 percent. Furthermore, while many lenders fear that buildings re-fitted to be schools are hard to resell or lease, the current rate of re-use for such properties is more than 95 percent. Finally, bigger schools, older schools (especially those started more than one year after a state's charter law was enacted), and schools run by EMOs all have close-to-negligible default rates. The arrival of this report is timely indeed, not only because it might help to put lenders at ease about this market, but also because it's great to see funders like Kauffman wading into the nitty-gritty of making charter schools work. Worth reading, and available here.
James J. Kemple, Corinne M. Herlihy, and Thomas J. Smith, MDRC
May 2005
This well-named publication reports the findings from a federally-funded study of the "Talent Development" high school reform design as it was implemented in five Philadelphia schools. This model, developed in 1994 by the Johns Hopkins-based "Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed At Risk" (CRESPAR), combines many reform elements still in vogue today: smaller learning communities; an intensive, standards-based ninth-grade program; and an upper-level curriculum that links academics to career pursuits. The results were positive, though modest, as the title implies. Ninth graders participating in the program did better in terms of attendance, credits earned, and promotion to the tenth grade, and maintained these advantages through their next several years of school. As for test score gains, slight increases were detected in eleventh grade once the program had been in place for several years. Meanwhile, graduation rates rose by 8 percent. Still, as the study points out, these schools remain in desperate straits; even with the program, only half of all ninth graders will graduate within four years. High school reformers should read it for a dose of sobering reality even as researchers squabble over its "quasi-experimental" design. You can download it here.
John Merrifield, Cato Institute
June 2005
In this dry but important book, John Merrifield takes a look at the current state of school reform on a global scale and envisions changes needed to advance the reform movement. Using seven examples of parental-choice programs in Chile, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States, he contends that current school choice initiatives should be seen as "early milestones toward real and substantive reform, not destinations, or even indefinite rest stops." According to Merrifield, the small experiments that have been adopted in the U.S. are not enough to force change; advocates need to push for more. Namely, several "essential elements" are needed in order to transform the school choice movement into a "reform catalyst": the freedom for schools to specialize, non-discrimination regarding funding, low formal entry barriers, avoiding price controls, and minimal private school regulation. We would add "accountability for results" to the list, but otherwise the book is useful reading. You can download it here.
In just more than five years, Mary Anne Stanton has led 13 Catholic schools from high-poverty Washington, D.C. neighborhoods into a consortium that has not only strengthened each school's financial health, but has also greatly improved the academic performance of the children the schools are charged with educating. To get there, she's installed a new standards-based curriculum, shaken up old bureaucratic approaches, and streamlined operations. In its latest Fwd: Arresting Insights in Education, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation presents a compelling story of just how much change can be made by one determined school leader with a vision.
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It's not easy today even to recall the stir created in 1987 when an obscure West Virginia physician and his never-heard-from-before one-man advocacy organization called "Friends for Education" released a little study titled "Nationally Normed Elementary Achievement Testing in America's Public Schools: How All 50 States Are Above the National Average." Swiftly dubbed the "Lake Wobegon report" after Garrison Keillor's mythical Minnesota hometown where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average," it rocked the testing and education policy worlds, which were still reeling from A Nation at Risk just four years earlier.
As Education Week's Bob Rothman reported at the time, "The overwhelming majority of elementary-school pupils nationwide score above the average on normed achievement tests, results from a controversial new 50-state survey indicate. The survey...provides average scores from the 32 states that test elementary students statewide, as well as selected averages for district-administered tests in the 18 states without statewide assessments... Such findings suggest that norm-referenced tests - in which students are compared with a group tested in the past, not with other current test takers - 'do not represent an accurate appraisal of educational performance,' argued John Jacob Cannell, the group's president and author of the report.... Based on the most recent results available, 90 percent of school districts and 70 percent of students tested performed above the average on nationally normed tests, the report estimates. Those scores are inflated because testing companies set norms that are artificially low, Dr. Cannell charged. Test publishers 'want to have good news to sell to superintendents,' he said in an interview."
It was a bombshell precisely because nothing like it had been said before and because Americans were accustomed to trusting their local superintendents and newspapers to supply accurate information about school performance. Though the Education Department's controversial "Wall Chart" annually compared state academic achievement using such measures as SAT and ACT scores, not until a year after Cannell's report did Congress agree to permit NAEP results to be reported state-by-state (and that practice remained optional for states until NCLB was enacted in 2001). International assessments were rare and their results reported in such arcane ways as to make comparison essentially impossible. Since states and districts used tests of their own choosing and reported their own results as they saw fit, other than national NAEP results Americans had no practical way of gauging the achievement of children in one state versus another or in relation to the country as a whole. More important, there was no effective external audit by which state and district test score reports could be appraised for their honesty and accuracy.
Cannell's blast altered that landscape. We already knew the country was "at risk" but nobody supposed that most Americans were getting misleading information about their own schools' performance. Cannell suggested, in fact, that most people were living in an education fool's paradise, duped by the complicity of school superintendents and testing companies to report cheery news even when unwarranted by the facts. His report began to explain that familiar yet puzzling Gallup finding wherein people conferred low grades on the education system in general but high marks on their own kids' schools.
Why recall this tale eighteen years later? Because NCLB still allows states to select their own tests, to define "proficiency" however they like, and to choose their own passing scores on those tests. And because Paul Peterson's and Rick Hess's recent analysis of state proficiency claims versus NAEP results suggests that the majority of states are still awash in unwarranted good news about their students' true performance (see here). Of the forty states that Peterson and Hess were able to compare, just five earned "A" for defining and measuring proficiency on their state test in ways that yielded results akin to NAEP's. The average gap between a state's proficiency claims as gauged on its own tests and the fraction of its kids deemed proficient by NAEP was a staggering 36 percent (in fourth grade reading). That means if one accepts NAEP's standard of proficiency as a suitable benchmark, the overwhelming majority of states are categorizing millions of youngsters as proficient who really aren't. Most of the country, in other words, is still paddling in Lake Wobegon.
Though the testing industry and many state and local officials rose up to smite Dr. Cannell back in 1988, Bill Bennett and I, then at the Education Department, asked the federally funded research center on testing and measurement, based at UCLA, to examine his findings. Their conclusion: Cannell may have exaggerated a bit but he was essentially correct. Said testing expert Dan Koretz, "He was clearly right about his basic conclusion. With respect to national averages, districts and states are presenting inflated results and misleading the public."
To be sure, Cannell is a bit of an eccentric. He vanished from sight soon after his fifteen minutes of testing fame; moved to New Mexico to study psychiatry, then forensic psychiatry; and is now on the staff of California's largest hospital for the criminally insane. In his spare time, he directs the "Vitamin D Council," which contends that "many humans are needlessly suffering and dying from Vitamin D deficiency" (See here).
But he hasn't lost his activist's passion, his crusader's zeal or his interest in honest score reporting. Recently, he sent me (and Margaret Spellings, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) a letter noting that No Child Left Behind "does not place any restraints on state officials telling large numbers of students they are testing above the 'national average.' Nor does it prevent school officials from cheating; in fact, it encourages cheating by greatly raising the testing stakes." The solution, he contends, is a single, secure, NAEP-style "national achievement test."
And you know, he might just be as right about that in 2005 as he turned out to be about test-score reporting in 1987.
Last week, offering up some "First thoughts on the NAEP" (see here), we noted that "Success has a thousand fathers and many will try to claim credit" for the good news about achievement gains amongst 9-year-olds. It's been amusing this week to watch various interests tie themselves in knots to attribute the NAEP data to their particular approach, gimmick, program or conviction. Leslie Conery, of the International Society for Technology in Education, attributed gains to, you guessed it, technology in education. "If you put powerful tools in the hands of teachers, powerful results will occur," she told eSchool News. Neil McCluskey, Cato Institute scholar and author of "NCLB: Leave the Feds Behind," sniffed at the Bush administration's claim that NCLB was behind the increases in scores: "If it worked that fast, NCLB would be a certified miracle. . . . If anything, No Child Left Behind is much more likely to reverse than accelerate promising academic trends." McCluskey attributes the improvements to - one guess now - school choice. But the strangest interpretation of the NAEP long-term trend results must come from the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times, whose editorial page theorized that "the constant flow of data that shows poor and diminished performance in middle schools and high schools" is caused by school systems "placing their most well-trained and experienced teachers in the early grades, a strategy that means the teachers become less and less qualified over all as the students move up the grades." Not even a shred of proof is adduced, but hey, when you're the Times, who needs evidence?
"Reading, math up for nine-year-olds," by Corey Murray, eSchool News, July 19, 2005
"Federal test results, NCLB link unfounded," by Greg Garner, Cato Daily Dispatch, July 15, 2005
"Failing to teach in high school," New York Times, July 9, 2005
No, the percentage of kids graduating hasn't gone up, but after years of prodding by reformers on the left and right - especially Jay Greene, the Education Trust, and the Urban Institute - 45 governors have committed to a common formula for calculating the rates themselves. Worth celebrating, yes, but turning their promise into reality will be no small task. While doing the math differently is easy, building the kinds of comprehensive data systems required is not. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the governors' announcement was the show of support for state-to-state comparisons from two presidential contenders (one from each party). Outgoing NGA chair and Virginia Democratic governor Mark Warner explained: "Right now, different states have different definitions. So how can we make valid comparisons? And if you can't compare, how do we validate who has the best practices?" Meanwhile, incoming NGA chair and Arkansas Republican governor Mike Huckabee analogized the current patchwork system of differing state definitions to a basketball game, with one team shooting at an 8-foot-high basket and another shooting at a 10-foot basket. "We should all be shooting at a 10-foot basket," he said. "This will give us the ability to honestly know how well we are doing compared to the other states." Amen. But the same point could be made about differing state academic standards, proficiency cut-offs, and the wildly variable expectations children in different parts of the country now face. Mr. and Mr. Candidate: How about signing on to national standards and tests, too?
"Governors endorse a standard formula for graduation rates," by Michael Janofsky, New York Times, July 18, 2005
"Governors, national organizations reach agreement on graduation rate," National Governors Association News Release, July 17, 2005