A remedial reading program with basic phonics instruction and sentences like "Dad had a sad lad," is being taught to 35,000 middle and high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District this year, much to the embarrassment of students in the program, who landed in these classes due to their low Stanford 9 reading scores. While some schools and districts have had success with the program, some experts say the approach is misguided and that teenagers need a different approach to reading instruction. The Bush administration will convene a meeting of researchers and teachers this fall to examine the best ways of improving reading skills beyond the fourth grade. "Teens get a second chance at literacy," by Duke Helfand, Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2002

Is Success for All (SFA) the leading example of evidence-based education in America or is it all smoke and mirrors? In a long story in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, Jay Mathews traces the history of SFA and describes how this instructional program came to be used in 1500 schools despite the fact that many teachers hate its regimentation and one researcher, Stanley Pogrow, has made it his mission to debunk any claims of success made by its developers, Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden. Unlike most instructional programs and "whole school reforms," there exist for SFA a number of studies showing that the average student taught using SFA outperforms his or her peers in a control group, often by a large margin. But what Pogrow points out is that these SFA students are often still far below grade level and fall farther behind as time passes. While the debates between Slavin and Pogrow in the pages of Phi Delta Kappan and other education magazines may appear to be methodological disputes over how to measure the effectiveness of an education intervention, Mathews notes that without agreement on what will count as evidence of a program "working" there can be no meaningful discussion of how to fix schools. And policymakers will have to decide "whether to celebrate or condemn modest gains from programs like SFA when there is no concrete evidence that any other general approach-with the possible exception of preliminary efforts in a few schools-has done any better." "Success for Some," by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post Magazine, July 21, 2002

If private school vouchers are offered to all parents living in poor districts (as opposed to being offered only to low-income families), this would lessen income segregation across school districts. That's because many families presently stretch their budgets to pay inflated housing prices in good public school districts. If a middle-income family living in such a district chooses to switch to a private school with the help of a voucher, that family could then afford to move to a worse school district and get more house for its money. So argues Tom Nechyba of Duke University and the National Bureau of Economic Research in "The Unintended Benefits of Private School Choice," which appears in the June 2002 issue of The School Choice Advocate, the newsletter of the Milton and Rose B. Friedman Foundation, at http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/resources/publications/advocate/june2002advocate.pdf

That many of our vast public school systems are all but ungovernable doesn't stop the powers that be from searching far and wide for messiah-like figures to lead them. Philadelphia's latest quest for the perfect executive led the City of Brotherly Love to select Paul Vallas, who rides in from Chicago to see whether he can lead another troubled urban system out of educational perdition. As The Philadelphia Inquirer said, "It's hard to imagine a person with better credentials...to lead a radical academic makeover of an urban school system." The less reverent Daily News, however, warned him that "Philadelphia's education problems are much harder than the Windy City's. To paraphrase a famous Chicago saying, Philadelphia might not be ready for reform."

The paper noted some inhospitable features of the local scene: a mayor who doesn't want to be responsible for education, state officials who don't mind being responsible but will be out of office in January, a famously intransigent teachers union, even a separate union of school principals.

The point, of course, is that it's possible to surround even the finest leader with crippling constraints. Despite what looked a few months back like the brightest big-city education reform opportunity in the land, Philadelphia may be greeting its new public-school CEO with the kiss of Judas.

Up the turnpike, New York City is the scene of another leadership drama. Mayor Bloomberg is auditioning candidates to run that city's sprawling school system, over which he has now wrested effective political control-at the cost of agreeing to a generous teachers' union contract that contains no reforms whatsoever. He's being secretive and coy, prompting much speculating. Will he go with a minority woman? Black or Hispanic? A proven administrator? A newcomer to Gotham or one who knows his way around the city's Byzantine politics? Why didn't he pluck Vallas from Philadelphia's fingers?

It doesn't help that hizzoner has divulged nothing about his own plans and priorities for the school system-assuming he has such. Because there are no policy initiatives to appraise, the chancellor search gets invested with even greater drama.

But one doesn't have to be a New Yorker to be a wee bit cynical about it. As Anemona Hartocollis recently wrote in the Times, "In the annals of the maddeningly frequent quest for a...chancellor, there are a few examples of the unconventional, let's-really-shake-things-up candidacies. They always fizzled."

As in Philadelphia-and as Roy Romer has painfully learned in Los Angeles-pure leadership doesn't equal effective education reform. If the deck is stacked against the CEO-if the mayor or school board isn't solidly behind him, if the unions are hostile, if the business community isn't united, if there's no strong team of second-tier executives at school headquarters-nobody can lead effectively. That's even true in far smaller systems, such as Dayton's, which has just promoted deputy superintendent Percy Mack to the top job. One can only wish him-and Vallas and New York's ??-well as they embark upon these mostly thankless missions.

Speaking of CEO's, as the markets gyrate and Congress frantically seeks a legislative mechanism for making corporations and accountants clean up their acts and tell the truth, the education parallels struck me hard. No Child Left Behind could fairly be seen as the federal government's effort to make K-12 education clean up its act and tell people the truth. (So, in a way, is the pending bill to overhaul the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.)

There's not a lot of outright fraud in education (except for some sleazy Internet operations advertising cut-rate college degrees based on one's life experience) but there's plenty of shading the truth and an acute shortage of truly independent audits by truly objective outsiders. Parents told that their child (or school) is "at grade level" are seldom told what that means (simply an "average" score on a normed test taken by others in the same grade, no matter whether that average is laudable or awful). Taxpayers and voters told that "seventy percent of this state's fourth graders scored at or above the 'proficient' level on the state test" are told nothing about who decided what cut-off denotes proficiency or how this compares with other states' (or the National Assessment's) expectations. When SAT scores sagged, the College Board responded by "recentering" them, which had the practical effect of adding a hundred points or so to everybody's scores. Such shenanigans make people feel good but deny them the sometimes-harsh truth.

The underlying problem is that most education standards are set, tests administered and scores reported not by objective outsiders but by those running the education system itself or with a stake in how it looks. In other words, there's no meaningful external audit. Or if there is the semblance of one (e.g. a testing company hired by the state to administer and score its assessments), as with Arthur Andersen's relationships with Enron and WorldCom, the auditor depends for its future business on whether it pleases its client, which is the organization that wants to look good on the audit, not the more nebulous and distant constituencies that crave the truth.

Until recently, local school systems chose their own tests-thus giving rise to the notorious "Lake Wobegon" effect-and when it came time to report the results, it was the local superintendent spinning the data in his own press release, which was usually all that the media could understand or report. Much of this persists today, but the advent of state standards and tests (foreshadowed by older examples like the New York Regents' exams) began to create a semblance of an external audit. This, however, put enormous pressure on state test givers and test contractors and, at the end of the day, they, too, have often succumbed to the need to look good, to ensure that a politically acceptable fraction of children get promoted and graduate, etc.

Enter Uncle Sam. For a decade, he trusted the states to get it right. That was the thrust of federal education reform in the 1990's, including the Goals 2000 program and the 1994 E.S.E.A. reauthorization. Washington admonished states to set standards, give tests and create accountability mechanisms, but it pretty much left them to do these things in their own ways.

That didn't work very well. Lots of states faltered, dithered or opted for non-confrontational, feel-good arrangements. Student achievement remained flat. Gaps did not narrow. Many schools lingered on the "unsatisfactory" list. It's not unlike Washington's prolonged period of trusting corporate America and the accounting profession to do the right thing, with the Securities and Exchange Commission monitoring. That hasn't worked so well, either, and for much the same reason: because a system built on trust depends on the veracity, rigor, conscientiousness, courage and public-mindedness of those being trusted. And sometimes those qualities turn out to be in short supply.

Now Congress is rushing to crack down on dubious corporate accounting practices and to ensure that outside audits are truly independent and honest. No Child Left Behind does much the same thing to K-12 education. It manifests Washington's discontent with the education system's own truthfulness-and greater discontent with the system's capacity to reform itself. Now, therefore, we find all sorts of federal rules about how tests will be given, scored and reported, about what will be on school report cards, about what should be done to faltering schools, and so forth.

This isn't easy, either. We've identified many ways in which states (and perhaps schools) can fiddle and finagle the NCLB requirements. No doubt corporate CEOs and accounting firms will also devise ways to ease the pinch of whatever new rules Congress finally lays upon them. At the end of the day, in a free society with a relatively light-handed government, all these federal requirements do is boost the odds that people and institutions will do what they should. Those bent on duping others will still manage to misbehave. The sad fact is that we don't have any fully satisfactory way of compensating for the erosion of trust, integrity and truthfulness.

"Vallas in Wonderland," Editorial, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 11, 2002

"A Welcome to Paul Vallas," Editorial, Philadelphia Daily News, July 11, 2002

"Search for New Chancellor Loses a Leading Candidate" by Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times, July 10, 2002 (available for a fee at http://www.nytimes.com)

Writing in the summer 2002 issue of Manhattan Institute's City Journal, California State University classics scholar Victor Davis Hanson examines the decline of civic education in America, tracing much of it to the degradation of history and the triumph of multiculturalism and relativism, and suggests (in fairly general terms) what would be needed to revive it. See "The Civic Education America Needs," at http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_the_civic.html.

In an editorial in last week's Gadfly, Checker Finn blasted the AFT's new report "Do Charter Schools Measure Up?" A point-by-point refutation of the key conclusions of the AFT's study will be posted later today by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers at http://www.charterauthorizers.org. The Progressive Policy Institute also bashes the report at http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=110&subsecid=900001&contentid=250663 (see blurb #1).

Nearly two thirds of blacks would enroll their children in a charter or private school if given the chance, according to a poll by the Black America's Political Action Committee. Conducted during the week before the Zelman decision, the poll also showed that the majority of blacks surveyed gave public schools a "C" grade or lower when asked to evaluate their condition. "Poll finds most blacks favor charter, private schools," by Ellen Sorokin, The Washington Times, July 19, 2002

With rewards and punishments now tied to test scores, states can't afford to risk complaints about bias in their test questions, so sensitivity guidelines adopted in the 1960s to address the "culturally lopsided" view of America presented in the reading passages of standardized tests have now stretched to cover "almost everyone in almost every situation." Testing companies avoid mentioning anything that might offend or alarm any student, which means eliminating from reading passages things like kids with braces and pimples (too upsetting), backyard swimming pools (symbols of affluence), nurturing women (a stereotype), or even hurricanes (too scary for kids in some states). Hamburgers and sodas are out; if kids are eating anything, it has to be fruit and vegetables. For more, see "Exam Makers Rush to Delete Anything Offensive to Anyone," by June Kronholz, The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2002
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In "A Knowledge Base for the Teaching Profession: What Would It Look Like and How Can We Get One?" James Hiebert, Ronald Gallimore and James Stigler acknowledge that the U.S. teaching profession does not draw heavily upon a shared base of solid "craft knowledge" grounded in the analysis and communication of what effective teachers have learned. "Practitioner knowledge," they call it. They offer three features of such knowledge that are useful to teachers, identify three additional features that must be supplied (e.g. verifiability) if full advantage is to be taken of it, and speculate on what would be needed for all this to be done in a systematic way in the United States. They're skeptical, however, due to the presence of what they see as two separate education communities, one comprised of researchers, the other of practitioners, with different languages, values, priorities and communications systems. You'll find this thoughtful Educational Researcher article at www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol31_05/AERA310502.pdf.

"Making School Reform Work" is the slightly misleading title of an essay by Checker Finn on the subject of educational accountability in the summer 2002 issue of The Public Interest. It distinguishes three distinct forms of accountability and seeks to evaluate them. Unfortunately, it's not in the on-line edition but you can find this journal in many libraries and can obtain contact or subscription information at http://www.thepublicinterest.com/. A longer and rather different version of these ideas is set forth in Finn's chapter in the Hoover Institution volume, School Accountability: An Assessment by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, reviewed in the Gadfly at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=59#860.