Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered its latest U.S. history assessment to approximately 29,000 students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in schools across the country. NAEP's web site now offers the public the opportunity to test their knowledge of American history and see how their performance stacks up against students in the nationwide sample. Visitors to the web site can answer actual multiple choice questions from the 2001 NAEP, can see how many students answered the same questions correctly, and can then read about the knowledge that NAEP's architects intended for those questions to test. Check it out at http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/kidsquiz/index.asp?flash=false.
Reporter Larry Slonaker took a one year leave of absence from The Mercury News to fulfill a lifelong dream of teaching in a California public school (using an emergency teaching credential). Surprised as much by his own deficiencies as by his students' woeful lack of skills, he deems his stint as a seventh grade language arts teacher "surprising, irritating, elevating, frustrating," but most of all, hard. See "My year as a teacher," by Larry Slonaker, The Mercury News, August 25, 2002.
A long story in The Christian Science Monitor looks at where Rod Paige came from to try to understand how he became so single-minded about leaving no child behind. Reporter Amanda Paulson interviewed neighbors, family members and former colleagues for this colorful portrait of the Secretary of Education. "True believer," by Amanda Paulson, The Christian Science Monitor, September 10, 2002.
Special education is receiving a lot of attention these days. The federal program to provide special accommodations and services to students with disabilities has been critiqued by a Presidential Commission, by multiple authors of a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Progressive Policy Institute volume, and by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. Although there is some overlap in opinions about how IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) should be reformed, Democrats (and a certain Independent Senator) tend to argue that the system is merely under-funded, Republicans that it fails to deliver clear results, and less partisan academics that it is over-regulated and obsessed with proceduralism.
Into the fray recently jumped Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-CA) with HR 5001, the "Realizing the Spirit of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act." His basic proposal is to allow states to earn their way to full funding of the federal share of special education by narrowing various yawning outcome gaps between their regular and special-needs student populations.
In the U.S. today, special education primarily takes the form of an under-funded federal mandate. Federal laws bestow upon disabled students certain rights regarding their education. These include the right to a diagnosis by a trained professional to determine if the child suffers from a disabling condition that affects learning. Students diagnosed with a disability are then guaranteed a "free and appropriate public education" at taxpayer expense. Congress once "pledged" to pay 40% of the additional cost of educating students with disabilities. However, that promise is not an entitlement, and federal appropriators have never come close to reimbursing states and localities for 40% of the actual difference between special education and regular education expenses. The Fiscal-Year 2002 federal appropriation for special education will cover only an estimated 16.5% of the $50 billion in additional costs for special education.
A second problem with special education is that we have little idea what is being accomplished with those $50 billion. Prior to the 1997 amendments to IDEA, states and localities were not required to test special-needs students to assess their academic progress. Consequently, few jurisdictions conducted rigorous assessments. The 1997 amendments broke new ground by requiring that states include as many special education students as possible in their state assessments and report their performance. However, the law contains so many opt-outs, waivers, and weak penalties for non-compliance that few states have taken it seriously. HR 5001 seeks to change that undesirable state of affairs.
Congressman Stark's proposal applies the basic principle of "pay-for-performance" to the funding of special education. States that narrow the performance gap between special and regular education students in (1) academic achievement, (2) attendance, (3) retention, (4) high school graduation, or (5) post-secondary employment or education would receive annual bonuses of 0.2-1% in federal funding for each gap narrowed, depending on the amount of ground made up, to a maximum of 5% per year. A state that consistently and substantially narrowed all five gaps would achieve the Holy Grail of 40% federal funding within five years. States would never experience a reduction in their percentage of federal funding for special education, which would change from an annual appropriation to an entitlement. We could be confident that states wouldn't perversely attempt to "back into" gap-narrowing by sabotaging their regular education programs, since doing so would risk tough sanctions under the recently-enacted No Child Left Behind Act.
HR 5001 also contains a number of specific provisions to enhance the validity of performance numbers. The average gap on each measure for the preceding three years would be used as the baseline for measuring progress in subsequent years. At least 90% of a state's special education population must be included in the calculation of each performance level. Students diagnosed as qualifying for special education would remain in that category, for purposes of calculating performance, for the remainder of their schooling, and any testing accommodations afforded to them would remain consistent year after year.
HR 5001 is not likely to satisfy every special ed reformer. Once states attain the 40% federal funding level, full funding is guaranteed in perpetuity, thus removing any financial incentive for further gains. Educational achievement is not especially privileged in the bonus calculations, as states could gain as much by boosting the attendance of special education students as by demonstrating increases in their actual learning. More importantly, HR 5001 does nothing to change the current system of procedural over-regulation that steers resources away from the special education classroom and into meetings, official forms, administrator salaries, and judicial proceedings. Nor does it enhance parental choices. If the analysts are right, however, and the rigidities and cumbersome oversight systems of special education are interfering with the ability of educators to obtain results for special-needs students, then Congressman Stark's proposal would create incentives for special educators and administrators to join reformers in trying to trim back the red tape. As such, HR 5001 may, in the long run, accomplish its professed goal of realizing the spirit of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In my opinion, it at least represents a reasonable place to start the reform debate regarding the reauthorization of IDEA.
Patrick J. Wolf is an assistant professor of public policy at Georgetown University and has testified before Congress regarding the reform of special education.
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Two papers co-authored by Patrick Wolf and Bryan Hassel appear in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, published by the Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute in 2001. See "Effectiveness and Accountability (Part 1): The Compliance Model" and "Effectiveness and Accountability (Part 2): Alternatives to the Compliance Model" at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/special_ed_final.pdf.
Are charter schools really different? Two studies published by the Fordham Foundation in recent years found that charter schools were serving as promising seedbeds for new approaches to finding, employing, and keeping better teachers. These innovative policies are described in "Do Charter Schools Do It Differently" by the Gadfly's own Chester Finn and Marci Kanstoroom, published in the September 2002 Phi Delta Kappan (which is not available online). The two reports that underlie this article, "Personnel Practices in Charter Schools" and "Autonomy and Innovation: How Do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom," are available at http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=4.
Elected urban school board members are not accountable to the public, possess modest skills, are conflict-prone and politicized, and cannot work successfully with superintendents, concludes University of Memphis professor Tom Glass in a yet to be published report described by Jay Mathews at WashingtonPost.com. Glass, who has spent a career studying school district leadership, thinks mayors or governors ought to select school board members and thinks school boards ought to be independently evaluated, with ineffective board members removed. See "Playing Politics in Urban City Schools," by Jay Mathews, Washingtonpost.com, September 10, 2002
The Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, offers $5 billion over six years to states and school districts to support research-based reading instruction, but not everybody is happy about the strings attached to this funding. In a front-page story in Tuesday's Washington Post, reporter Valerie Strauss gives voice to critics of Reading First who try to paint the program as "promoting corporate control of the education of our children."
Detractors have two main gripes: that the Education Department will only provide funds for programs that explicitly teach phonics, and that the Department is strongly encouraging the use of certain commercial phonics-based programs that are highly structured or scripted. The first complaint flies in the face of solid evidence that explicit instruction in phonics is crucial for children struggling to read, and only a few holdouts at the International Reading Association (naively described by Strauss as apolitical) continue to claim otherwise.
The second complaint, that the Education Department is pushing specific phonics-based reading programs, is denied by officials there, who say that there is no magic list of approved reading programs. Any list of demonstrably effective reading programs, however, would by necessity include highly structured or scripted programs like Direct Instruction, since independent research has found them to be among the most successful at teaching children to read, and the Department of Education has, in fact, mentioned some of these programs as examples of effective reading programs. But instead of reviewing the evidence for the effectiveness of different reading programs being recommended by the Department, the Post article digresses into an exploration of the connections between the publishers of certain popular reading programs and the Bush administration, as if it were friendship and profit that drive the government's decisions and advice on reading instruction rather than programs' effectiveness in teaching youngsters to read.
The Post article portrays a battle between ed school professors who believe that teachers must be freed from highly-scripted reading instruction and publishing companies that sell materials based on principles of reading instruction that really work. It would be a shame if fear of the profit motive prevented us from making the best possible decisions for kids.
"Phonics pitch irks teachers," by Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post, September 10, 2002.
The following appeared on The Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" page on September 9:
"In a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, one April Falcon Doss explains why she chose to send her daughter to a private school:
For a card-carrying liberal, I was surprisingly unapologetic about our decision. Why should I sacrifice our daughter's future to an abstract principle? I wasn't up to battling the school system about class size, curriculum and extracurricular activities. And by the time any changes could be made, our daughter would have already missed out on a vibrant education.
Here in a nutshell is the definition of an American liberal: one who is willing to sacrifice the future of other people's children to an abstract principle." From "My Public Spirit Stops at My Daughter" at http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002241.
Berkeley High-the only public high school in Berkeley, California-sends many of its students on to top colleges but consigns just as many to failure. Though the school, one of the first in the land to desegregate voluntarily, is highly diverse, a UC Berkeley study concluded that it suffers from "apartheid-like segregation," with white students racing ahead in Advanced Placement courses and poorly prepared black students struggling to keep up in a "sink-or-swim" atmosphere. Learn about the school's desperate attempts to close its exposed achievement gap-which likely went undetected before the era of standards and testing-in "Top-Notch School Fails to Close Achievement Gap," by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2002.
Researchers from Teachers College and the University of Maryland sought to find out "what actually happens to children during an entire school day" so they asked elementary teachers to complete a time diary. From this, they computed how much time was spent on academic subjects, enrichment activities (for example, art, music, and health instruction), maintenance activities (like packing up or traveling between classrooms), and recess, with results broken down by students' race, gender, grade, special needs, family characteristics, and classroom characteristics. They found that white students were significantly more likely to have longer school days, that minority students spent more time on core subjects at the expense of recess and enrichment activities, that students in larger classes spent more time on academics, and that the type of school (private or public) explained a large percentage of the variance in the uses of students' time. "What Happens During the School Day?: Time Diaries from a National Sample of Elementary School Teacher," by Jodie Roth, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Miriam Linver and Sandra Hofferth, Teachers College Record, 2002 (free registration required).