Budget shortfalls have led California to abandon its $100 million cash reward program for teachers in schools that demonstrate significant improvements in test scores. While the state will continue to rank schools based on academic gains, state lawmakers have not included any funding for these awards in the 2002-03 budget bill. Critics of high-stakes testing who lobbied to end the program now complain that it???s unfair to distribute cash rewards one year and take them away the next. ???Davis yanks incentives for teachers,??? by Suzanne Pardington, Contra Costa Times, August 3, 2002

California has been in the hot seat since the U.S. Department of Education noticed that it was planning to meet the ???highly qualified teachers??? requirement of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act by labeling teaching interns and those with emergency certification as ???highly qualified.??? The new law requires that all newly-hired teachers who work with Title I students must be highly qualified, and that all teachers of core subjects in all schools must be highly qualified by 2005-06. NCLB defines a highly qualified teacher as one who has full state certification or is participating in an alternate route certification AND who has demonstrated competence in the subjects he or she teaches. Rep. George Miller, one of the driving forces behind NCLB, criticized members of the California Board of Education who devised the sketchy plan for meeting the requirement and urged them to reconsider the policy. If the state does not revise its definition of highly qualified so that it comports with the federal law, the U.S. Department of Education could withhold some of the state???s Title I funds (which total nearly $1 billion).

State officials say that experienced teachers are in short supply, and that low-income schools will be forced to raise class sizes to 50 or 60 pupils if they cannot hire teachers without full certification. The number of uncredentialed teachers in California soared after the state began its massive class-size-reduction initiative in 1996, but the state does have 350,000 fully certified teachers. These teachers meet the definition of highly qualified under NCLB and, if they were deployed in Title I schools, the state would be in compliance for 2002-2003. In other words, California could meet NCLB???s expectations for staffing Title I schools if it redeployed its teaching force and stopped concentrating new instructors and those with the least subject knowledge in schools that enroll poor and minority children. For the longer run, however, this state (and most others) will need to rethink its system of licensure so that individuals who might be talented teachers are no longer discouraged by the hoops and hurdles of traditional certification.

???California Education Funding Imperiled,??? by Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2002

???State, U.S. Feud over Teachers,??? by Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times, August 6, 2002

???Tortuous Routes,??? by David Ruenzel, Education Next, Spring 2002

While the superintendent???s job is being rethought, their lieutenants are still part of the old order, at least in Connecticut. Even assistant superintendents are protected by the state???s teacher tenure laws and cannot be fired without the hearings and process afforded to teachers, according to a state supreme court ruling in Connecticut. ???Ruling helps fired school official,??? by Rachel Gottlieb, The Hartford Courant, August 2, 2002

The Advanced Placement (AP) program has taken a beating this year, with Harvard announcing that it would only give credit for scores of 5 on AP tests and several prominent private schools withdrawing from the program altogether. But as Jay Mathews explains, these developments are really a healthy sign for the AP program, which, like the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, offers the challenge of college-level courses to high school students. ???AP, IB to be the next SATs???? by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, August 6, 2002

USA Today reports that 19 schools designated as "Blue Ribbon Schools" of excellence by the U.S. Department of Education also appear on states' lists of failing schools. As noted in last week's Gadfly, the federal Blue Ribbon Schools program was the subject of a Brookings expose last year and the Department recently announced that it would begin making test scores a major component of the selection process. "19 of USA's 'finest' schools are 'failing'," by Karen Thomas and Anthony DeBarros, USA Today, August 5, 2002

Andrew J. Coulson, Mackinac Center for Public Policy
July 2002

Freelance scholar Andrew J. Coulson is a libertarian who believes that Americans will have far better (and more economical) educations if the state backs out entirely, except for subsidies to low income families, leaving it to parents to pay for their children's education and encouraging for-profit education providers to flourish. If you read his major book of a few years back, Market Education: The Unknown History, you are acquainted with the extensive historical background he adduces for this argument. If you haven't read the big book, you might want to have a look at this 33-page mini-book, published by Michigan's Mackinac Center for Public Policy. You can learn more on the web at http://www.mackinac.org/4447.

Core Knowledge Foundation
2002

The fact-intensive K-8 curriculum sequence developed by E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation is famously demanding of students, but its rigorous and highly specific content can also be demanding of teachers who are expected to explain the nuances of classical music or African geography, perhaps for the first time. To help teachers prepare for the challenge, Core Knowledge has developed a college curriculum called "What Elementary Teachers Need to Know." The publication consists of syllabi for 18 recommended courses, written by experts and provocative in their specificity and comprehensiveness (and their length - often around 70 pages). Most courses are surveys of traditional liberal arts subjects, though devised with an eye to content that a solid K-8 curriculum will require teachers to know. (Two of the courses - Reading Instruction and Children's Literature - fall outside the traditional liberal arts core.) Core Knowledge believes that such an education would be invaluable for all teachers, not only those teaching in Core Knowledge schools, and could go a long way toward solving the nation's teacher quality crisis recently highlighted by Secretary Paige (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=54#802). Download the syllabi - as well as a companion essay suggesting ways in which schools of education could apply the recommendations - at http://www.coreknowledge.org/CKproto2/resrcs/syllabus.htm.

Dan Lips, Goldwater Institute
August 1, 2002

This 23-page paper was written for the Goldwater Institute by associate scholar Dan Lips. It uses the experience of Arizona???s 1997 education tax credit program to design one for the nation. According to the author???s estimates, such a program would cost the federal fisc about $3 billion per annum but, by enabling 1.6 million youngsters to shift from public to private schools, would save state-local taxpayers some $11 billion in public-school budgets. (Whether such a savings can in fact be realized depends, of course, on the elasticity of public-education budgets during a period of enrollment decline. Also uncertain is whether today???s private schools could accommodate that many additional pupils and whether a supply-side response would create more student slots.) It???s a worthwhile contribution to the continuing discussion of school choice via the tax code. Arizona Issue Analysis 173 is findable on the web at http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article.php/113.html.

edited by Sandra Vergari
July 2002

This excellent new reader on charter schools, edited by SUNY/Albany professor Sandra Vergari, explores numerous aspects of charter schools, particularly as they operate in individual states, and serves as a fine overview of the topic. Vergari wrote three of the fourteen chapters. The others were prepared by a mix of well-known scholars and new faces. Most consist of state-specific case studies (Minnesota, Arizona, California, Michigan, Colorado, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, New York and the Canadian province of Alberta), though these have different emphases and reach different conclusions. The editor???s concluding chapter is balanced, thoughtful and perceptive. A worthy addition to the libraries of charter aficionados and policy types, it is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The ISBN is 0822941805. You can get more information at http://www.pitt.edu/~press/2002/vergari.html.

Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics
July 2002

The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics recently issued this useful 127-page volume of data spanning a wide array of indicators of U.S. children's well-being, billed as the sixth annual report on "the condition of children." It includes basic demographics, "economic security," education, health and "behavior and social environment" and within many categories it displays trend data as well as the latest numbers. Outside of educational achievement, there's much good news here having to do with declining poverty, crime and mortality rates. This is a reference work, not a news item, but worth having in your data library. You can find it on the web at http://childstats.gov/americaschildren/.