California's budget crisis has dried up funds for the state's highly touted education awards program, which will not be distributed this academic year, Governor Gray Davis's administration announced last week. A fundamental piece of the state's accountability puzzle and a favorite program of the governor, decent-sized awards were to have gone to more than 2,300 high-performing schools and their teachers. Qualifying schools - which are fewer than last year, as test scores indicate Golden State schools have slowed their rate of improvement - will instead have to settle for certificates honoring their achievement. "Education Award Plans Suspended," by Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2002

The Department of Education has released a helpful "desktop reference" manual to the No Child Left Behind Act. In 180 pages, it discusses NCLB's major reforms, program by program, explaining how each intersects with the law's guiding principles of accountability, flexibility and local control, parental choice, and "what works." For each section, the guide relays "the purpose of the program, what's new in the law, how the program works, key requirements, how to achieve quality, how performance is measured, and key activities and responsibilities for state education departments." See "No Child Left Behind: A Desktop Reference 2002," Department of Education, 2002. (Free hard copies can be ordered at 877-433-7827.)

Aimee Howley, Edwina Pendarvis and Thomas Gibbs, Education Policy Analysis Archives
October 16, 2002

Based on responses from 508 Ohio principals, this short report seeks to determine "what conditions tend to attract and what conditions tend to deter principals from considering the superintendency." The authors seem untroubled that, "Despite the efforts of some districts to look for talented leaders from outside the ranks of the educator workforce, the traditional career path for educational administrators involves the move from teaching to the principalship to the superintendency." Why, one wonders, should this linear progression be taken as a given? One does not have to look far across the landscape of American education (outside Ohio) to find leaders from business, the military, law, and higher education running a variety of school districts. There are now "alternative" school leaders at the helm of districts ranging from New York City to Seattle to Okaloosa County, Florida to Benton Harbor, Michigan. The fact is, as the authors note, the modern superintendency has become a highly complex mix of the educational, managerial and political, and no one person can be an expert in all of these domains. Successful superintendents know how to lead a team of individuals that bring an array of talents to the table. The authors argue for creating incentives that focus on drawing the best and the brightest school principals into the highest levels of school administration, though their suggestions strike us as obvious and humdrum. No harm in doing those things but why not also create incentives and alternative pathways that could attract the best and the brightest from an expanded universe of candidates? This report is available online at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n43.html.

Brian P. Gill, Jake Dembosky, and Jonathan P. Caulkins, RAND
2002

This report from RAND studies the effectiveness of the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI), a United Way-funded effort to provide "high quality early care and education" to at-risk children from birth through age five in the Pittsburgh area. It does not evaluate the program's impact on the kids themselves. (It notes that a separate study, prepared by S. J. Bagnato of Scaling Progress in Early Childhood Settings (SPECS), reports "favorable outcomes" for participating children.) Rather, it evaluates the implementation of ECI using data from 1996 and 2000, and extensive interviews with program stakeholders. That implementation, RAND found, was rife with problems including low enrollment, bureaucracy, and out-of-control costs. Demonstrating the inherent conflict between community control and central control and the danger of overly ambitious goals, ECI failed in part because its complex structure (designed to accommodate both the communities and the United Way) slowed planning and created power struggles. To avoid the disappointing fate of ECI, RAND suggests some lessons for future large-scale reform initiatives, including focusing on clear goals, tailoring the services, having a clear administrative structure, carefully considering supply, demand and incentives, and engaging in ongoing, independent review. This 32-page executive summary is available at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1544.1/, where it may also be ordered in hard copy for $15. A PDF version of the 146-page report on which it is based can be found at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1544/, and ordered in hard copy for $20.

Camille Esch and Patrick Shields, Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning
2002

This short report from California's Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning would be more credible if its source weren't so thick with the ed schools and the NCTAF crowd. Written by Camille Esch and Patrick Shields and based on research by SRI International, it purports to be dismayed that 12 percent of California's 40,000 "uncredentialed" teachers possess advanced degrees. (Of course, it says nothing about the quality of their bachelor's degrees - nor how many of the masters degrees that adorn the resumes of conventionally certified teachers were earned in education.) It shows that these younger, less experienced teachers tend to be concentrated in the state's lower performing schools, a phenomenon that has previously been documented by others (and widely attributed to the statewide push for smaller class sizes, which tends to suck veteran teachers out of tough schools, replacing them with beginners). What's problematic about this study is its subtle deprecating of career changers and other unconventional teachers as unqualified by virtue of their lack of postgraduate degrees and its suggestion - this is what the press has seized on - that people from such backgrounds don't offer much of a solution to the problem of teacher shortages. You can see for yourself at http://www.cftl.org/documents/WhoisTeachingCAChildren.pdf.

Charisse Gulosino and James Tooley, E.G. West Centre, School of Education, University of Newcastle
August 2002

This fascinating new report from the imaginative British education researcher James Tooley, here joined by Charisse Gulosino, examines low-cost, low-priced private schools that educate poor children in the Philippines. You may previously have read Tooley on private schooling for the poor in other third-world countries, such as India. This is his first report on the phenomenon in the Philippines, based on a study of 81 such schools in some of the most disadvantaged parts of that land. Most are religious schools. Most charge very low tuitions, offer scholarships, get little government aid, yet manage to make ends meet and, in some cases, to make surpluses or profits. They appear to be doing a good job. Parents are satisfied. The schools have greater curricular flexibility (to teach English, especially) than their government counterparts. Yet various government policies impede their work and curb their expansion. For more information, surf to http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/research/philippines.html.

edited by Melanie Looney, Center for Education Reform
October 2002

Despite well-publicized failures, most charter schools are thriving, according to the Center for Education Reform (CER). In a new report, CER maintains that charter school closures - which total just 194, a scant 6.7 percent of the 2,874 schools ever chartered - are less about specific schools' shortcomings and more about obstacles placed in their paths by a jealous education establishment. CER analyzed the reasons for closure of 154 of those schools, breaking them down by type: financial, mismanagement, academic, district, facility, and "other." In some cases, schools were thwarted by lack of facilities, inadequate enrollment, or disputes between chartering organization and school personnel - woes that could have been largely avoided were it not for districts' hostility toward charters. In other cases, the schools were simply consolidated or counted as closed even though they never opened. No matter the reason for closure, the details are often more complicated than charter opponents would have you believe. Have a look at this interesting report - which is short on text but laden with data on each school - at http://www.edreform.com/charter_schools/closures.pdf. Hard copies are available for $19.95 each by calling 800-521-2118.

Jonathan Zimmerman
September 2002

Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at New York University, authored this account of 20th century struggles over the U.S. K-12 history curriculum as well as the teaching of religion and morality in the public schools. Historians I respect, such as Jeffrey Mirel and Diane Ravitch, praise it as a balanced treatment, but I find it an exasperating book. The author seems hostile to positive views of America making their way into textbooks and curricula (he terms that approach "mawkish and triumphal"). He objects to schools teaching morality and is condescending to those who, for example, don't think sex education is the school's business. He's nervous about religion - and people who take it seriously. And the grand bargain that he favors is deeply relativistic, refraining from judgments about, say, the difference between heroes and villains. The book is provocative, yes, and contains interesting passages on how various groups got themselves incorporated into textbooks and curricula (leading to today's riot of inclusivity and the twenty pound tomes that typically result). In the end, though, Zimmerman belongs in the camp of multiculturalists, moral relativists and those who fret when patriotism lifts its head in the classroom. The ISBN is 0674009185. The length is 307 pages. Harvard University Press is the publisher. More information can be found at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ZIMWHO.html.

Laura Goe, Education Policy Analysis Archives
October 14, 2002

Another California-specific study, this one by Berkeley doctoral candidate Laura Goe is a slightly more refined version of the point that "emergency" permit teachers are more apt to be found in lower achieving schools. There's an implication that they cause that low achievement, but the data show nothing of the sort. Causation isn't provable, at least not without an experimental study, which this isn't. The larger point, not made here, is that, because conventionally credentialed teachers are (rightly or not) more attractive to schools and thus more apt to be able to land more attractive jobs, when demand for teachers exceeds the supply of conventional candidates (which is the case in California due to overall enrollment growth as well as purposeful class size reduction), less appealing (and lower achieving) schools are more apt to wind up with unconventional teachers. Though this problem could be eased by reducing the demand for teachers, that's not what Ms. Goe recommends. Rather, she suggests more of the hair of the dog that bit us. You can view it at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n42/.

The Gadfly has buzzed repeatedly about pending legislation to reorganize the federal government's education research, statistics, assessment and evaluation functions. This week, the U.S. Senate put the finishing legislative touches on H.R. 3801, the "Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002." (It followed an interesting parliamentary course, with the final version being worked out between staff negotiators for the two houses before the Senate even passed it.) No doubt a high-visibility signing ceremony lies ahead at the White House.

This bill contains some good news for those (ourselves included) who have been concerned about the precarious independence of the federal statistics and National Assessment functions. Though there are still ambiguous spots where the director of the new Institute of Education Sciences - the umbrella organization that replaces the extant Office of Educational Research and Improvement - may be able to meddle and mold what goes on in the statistics and NAEP domains (via his control of peer review and publication review procedures and such like), the bill also gives some needed protections to the Commissioner of Education Statistics and the National Assessment Governing Board. It does not, however, tidy up the latter's longstanding statutory problems and, in the end, is only a little bit better than current law for NAEP and NCES.

Perhaps the most important thing the bill does is shift responsibility for program evaluation from the Secretary's office to the new Institute. However, one of the negotiators' last decisions placed that key function in the same sub-unit as the regional labs and the ERIC clearinghouses, a schizophrenic bureaucratic creation called the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance. (If this were a restaurant, it would probably specialize in salsa and cheesecake.) It's hard to imagine how this can work well.

In the end, Congress surrendered to the existing labs, the university-based research centers, the ERIC clearinghouses, and a motley crew of regional technical assistance centers. Which is to say, those who have been eating the research shop's lunch these past several decades will continue to do so. That leaves very little loose change for "real" research, despite much fancy language in this bill about scientifically based research. While the Institute director (who will be Russ Whitehurst for the foreseeable future) and its new National Board for Education Sciences will no doubt have big and probably good ideas about important directions for education research, it's far from clear that they'll have either the resources or the bureaucratic running room to implement them.

Progress in Washington is usually measured in inches. This time you need a microscope to see it.