Policymakers in Massachusetts have long faced ferocious testing critics wailing that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is harming public education and worsening dropout rates.  They endured myriad protests organized by opponents who claimed that MCAS was forcing educators to "teach to the test."  They winced at the high percentage of kids who failed each year. Then suddenly, there was something to smile about. On Monday, Department of Education officials released the results of the spring 2001 MCAS exams which showed that 82% of 10^th graders passed the English test and 75% passed the math test - increases of 16% and 20%, respectively, from the previous year. The results - which would be good news at any time - are all the more pleasing because high school students must now pass these sections of the MCAS to graduate.  (Last year's 10^th graders are the first class to face the new requirement; students who fail one or more sections are given four more tries to pass, with remediation to help them do so.)  Now that it has teeth, the MCAS is even better poised to promote reform and boost student achievement. Take that, testing critics!

"Spring 2001 MCAS Tests: Summary of State Results," Massachusetts Department of Education, October 2001.

"Dramatic Improvement in MCAS Scores," by Ed Hayward, Boston Herald, October 16, 2001.

Another state whose pursuit of standards-and-accountability based reform has been doubted by testing opponents had good news this week.  According to results released on Tuesday, Virginia schools nearly doubled their rate of success on the state's Standards of Learning exams this year, with 40 percent meeting this year's state benchmarks and an additional 30 percent of schools reaching targets for annual progress. Beginning in 2007, schools in the Old Dominion will need to reach the annual-progress targets to receive accreditation. For more, see "Virginia Schools Nearly Double Passing Rate on SOL Tests," by Liz Seymour, The Washington Post, October 17, 2001.

Last week's 24-hour National Education Summit was surely pleasant. IBM's Lew Gerstner is a fine host and his company's conference facility is exceptionally comfortable. Though the President did not make it - there was general consensus that he had important things to do back in the Oval Office - there were almost enough governors (about 15) and journalists on hand to make it feel like an important event. Corporate tycoons jetted in on private planes. Security was tight. Secretary Paige spoke at dinner. And while some VIPs had to have their arms twisted to come (and some, such as Florida's Jeb Bush, California's Gray Davis and AOL's Steve Case, were last minute no-shows), hundreds of educators wished they could have been there.

This was the 4^th such "summit" in a dozen years. The first - the famous 1989 Charlottesville confab - consisted only of governors and President. The three subsequent gatherings, under the aegis of the organization called Achieve, have engaged governors, CEOs and educators in joint pursuit of standards-based education reform. Gerstner has been the main sparkplug - as he is at Achieve - and has co-chaired these conclaves with education-minded governors (Michigan's John Engler this time). Last week's get-together came just two years after summit #3. Some thought there was no clear need for it, which likely worsened the attendance problem. The fact that pending federal ESEA legislation, which will impact many states, has not yet been finalized also added a touch of uncertainty. Still, this session served as a generally praiseworthy opportunity for busy, influential non-educators to rededicate themselves to standards-based education reform. Some, to be sure, were already quite dedicated. For others, it served as worthwhile tutorial and battery-charger.

Summits slope downward as well as up, however, and this one revealed a central weakness of this kind of gathering - and of this approach to school reform.

Though termed a "national education summit," it should, in truth, have been dubbed the "national summit on government-run public school systems." Nary a soul from the world of private schooling was present - never mind that they enroll 11 percent of the kids - and I spotted nobody from charter schooling, home schooling, out-sourced schooling or any of the other education options that loom with increasing prominence over the reform landscape. (OK, they're foothills, not mountains, but more and more people live in them.) Nor did bottom-up, market-style reform get any respect. Indeed, Gerstner and others dismissed that whole strategy as a sideshow, a distraction, something "not scalable." Nobody pointed out that charter schools alone have scaled themselves up to nearly 20 percent of the kids in several cities and that the competition they pose to "regular" public schools has emerged as a significant source of reform leverage on a number of systems (not to mention the good education they offer to hundreds of thousands of needy kids).

The summit acted as if none of that were happening. Rather, the only form of education it deemed legitimate was the government-run, bureaucratically managed kind. And the only type of reform on the table was the dirigiste kind that comes downward from the top, via mandates, government regulations and enforced uniformities - or, at most, government-sanctioned diversities.

These folks are very astute about that genre of reform, mind you. The statement of principles emerging from the summit ("Raising the Bar While Closing the Achievement Gap") is a fine set of guidelines for standards-based reform, well ahead of what states are now doing and well worth being taken seriously. It does an especially good job of setting forth guidelines for testing and accountability and is visionary with regard to teacher quality - including, for example, a wholehearted embrace of "multiple pathways" into the classroom.

Yet even this statement's adoption (by acclamation) offered a revealing peek at the summit's basic mindset. The staff draft had contained one tiny flicker of competition, in the section on "strengthening accountability," where states were told that "if a failing school is not able to make reasonable progress after an infusion of technical or financial assistance," they "should not hesitate to take more dramatic action - to change the management of the school, reconstitute its staff, or provide parents with the choice to transfer their students to other schools." An excellent formulation, I thought, suggesting how (as in Florida) standards-based reform and market-style reform strengthen each other. But this section precipitated the only floor amendment to the entire document, when the National Education Association's Bob Chase rose to propose that the word "public" be inserted into its final phrase. Without a murmur of dissent from anyone on the floor - including CEOs whose multi-billion dollar companies depend on the marketplace and governors whose states are fostering competition within K-12 education - the amendment was declared to have carried unanimously. And so it went, throughout the 24-hour event.

Part of the problem stems from equating "business leaders" with heads of vast corporate empires. Such folks think almost exclusively in "systemic" terms. They're accustomed to making high-level policy decisions that affect hundreds of production units and thousands of people. They are dirigiste to their cores. Their "theory of action" is light years from that of small businessmen and other entrepreneurs who grasp the value of dynamic start-ups, the virtues of lively competition among multiple providers - and the accompanying risks of failure. That sort of person is as scarce at these summits as charter and private school heads. In fact, nobody was there, at least nobody with speaking rights - several lurked among the "resource people" on the silent sidelines - who views change as coming primarily from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Hence the top down version of education reform got high quality attention from high quality people. And they left - many of them to view "Ground Zero" at Governor Pataki's behest - having renewed their erroneous assumption that it's the only kind of reform worth mentioning. 

"Education Summit Tests Reform," by Michael A. Fletcher, The Washington Post, October 11, 2001.

In this month's issue of Philanthropy, Michael Poliakoff asks some pointed questions about the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), the nonprofit organization created in 1987 to identify and reward "master teachers."  First, do the students of board-certified teachers achieve more than students whose teachers have not achieved this "distinction"?  Second, are the board's evaluation procedures even capable of identifying "master teachers"?  Poliakoff, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), argues that the answer to both questions is likely no. Inconclusive results emerged from the only study to date that has investigated the effect of board certification on student achievement. And the Board's own guidelines instruct evaluators to "ignore errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and simply to concentrate on evidence of pedagogical skills and proper attitude."  See why it's time for a serious evaluation of NBPTS and some "hard-nosed" competition in the realm of master teacher certification in "Mastering the Basics," by Michael Poliakoff, Philanthropy, October 2001. (available to subscribers only)

For a na??ve look at how the National Board's procedures work from the perspective of a school district trying to get its teachers certified, see several articles in this month's Catalyst: Voices of Chicago School Reform.

An article in this week's Education Week describes the alternative to the National Board that Poliakoff is helping to launch: "New Organization Aims to Develop Tests for Teachers," by Julie Blair, Education Week, October 17, 2001.

If you're a serious education reformer and want to make yourself angry, have a look at the "11^th Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education" written by none other than Gerald W. Bracey. You'll probably agree with nothing in it. It's mostly an anti-testing rant leavened by ad hominem attacks. You can find it in the October Phi Delta Kappan but your blood pressure will rise even higher if you go to the website version (not yet posted but expected soon), which will contain his despicable "rotten apple" awards. The big problem with this guy isn't just that he's wrong about practically everything. It's that he's so nasty.

It's getting more and more difficult to generalize about religious schooling in America.  An article in last week's Wall Street Journal reports that Catholic, Jewish, and other faith-based schools are seeing a wave of interest from students of other religions. Christian parents may pick a Jewish or Islamic school for their child (or vice versa) for a wide range of reasons. Some do it because the school has a strong academic program or is less expensive than a secular private school, some simply because they value diversity and want their children to learn about another religion. Somewhat surprisingly, most of the parents profiled in the article seem to be doing it for the religious teachings themselves.

"The basic values are more important to me than the specifics of the religion," explained one Christian parent who sends his son to a Jewish school. A Jewish parent who sends her son to a Jesuit school likes the fact that the school emphasizes "being a better all-around person rather than who is richer or who has the nicest pair of Nikes."  Often parents are seeking schools that can provide moral guidance for their children as an alternative to the "defiantly secular approach of many public schools."

Not everyone is pleased with this trend, the article notes. Traditionalists worry that schools are diluting their religious message in order to raise enrollment.  But while religious schools courting students of different faiths may have their eye on the bottom line, some also believe that diversity is even more important today as religious tensions escalate.

Not all religious schools seek to build bridges between people of different backgrounds, though; in fact, some seem to go out of their way to fan hostile feelings.  In an October 16 column, Marc Fisher of The Washington Post describes conversations he had with students and a principal at the Muslim Community School in Potomac, Maryland, a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC. 

According to Fisher, six young people, all born in this country and all U.S. citizens, told him they did not believe that Osama bin Laden was necessarily the bad guy the president says he is.  "Almost no matter what they were asked," Fisher writes, "the students' answers often included something about how the United States should focus not just on bin Laden's terror network but on 'the real terrorists,' which is their code for Israel, which they refer to as 'the illegitimate Zionist regime.'"

The school's principal, Salahudeen Kareem, was unwilling to denounce bin Laden because he does not trust the U.S. government to judge the evidence, Fisher writes.  "Being cautious doesn't mean we are turncoats," said Kareem, who is 50 and grew up in Washington, DC. "It means we want to wait until there are sufficient facts. I don't know Osama bin Laden. But whatever is said about him, I want it said about the Israeli prime minister. If we're going after terrorism, let's go at it at the roots, not the branches."  (The principal earlier wrote an essay about Israel in a school newsletter in which he said: "This state with its cursed population ... is founded on a racist, warped, cancerous ideology which says Jews are better than other people.")

Some opponents of religious schools will view this school as Exhibit A in the case against vouchers for religious schools, or even the right of parents to send their children to religious schools at their own expense. But the case for religious schooling shouldn't stand or fall on the example of one school, vexing though it may be. As lawyers like to say, "hard cases make bad law." If some religious schools teach appalling lessons, many others produce excellent citizens and are sought out by parents of other faiths for their children. (The same extremes can probably be found among public schools as well.)

In wartime, tensions are high and many people are eager to draw lines in the sand. Hotter heads might call for the state to shut down the Muslim Community School, or at the very least, to make sure that no public dollars go to support it. A better response would be to speak out against the school's message and confront its prejudice with facts and reasoned argument and good judgment. - Marci Kanstoroom

"Faith-Based Schools Open Door to Students of Other Religions," by Nancy Ann Jeffrey, The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2001. (available to subscribers only)

"Muslim Students Weigh Questions of Allegiance," by Marc Fisher, The Washington Post, October 16, 2001.

Dan Koretz and Mark Berends, RAND, 2001

The RAND Corporation's Dan Koretz and Mark Berends went hunting for evidence of grade inflation in U.S. high schools during the decade 1982-92. (They were only able to get data for math courses.) They found no nationwide grade inflation, but they did find some among high-income students and in urban schools. They also found general improvement in students' math proficiency. This 80-page report gets pretty technical and jargony ("after disattenuating for unreliability....") but you may want to have a look. You can find ordering information or download a (PDF) copy by surfing to http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1445/.

John Marks, Centre for Policy Studies, June 2000

John Marks is a British education expert who thinks heterodox thoughts and says irreverent things when warranted. In this 46-page study for the London-based Centre for Policy Studies (published in June 2000), he probes why the United Kingdom has recently experienced such an explosion (his word) in the number of children said to have special educational needs. (According to his data, the U.K. now classifies 2-3% of its school children as having explicit, serious physical and/or mental disabilities, but almost 20% more as having other sorts of "special educational needs.") His working conclusion: "We have brought this disaster upon ourselves." The reasons are numerous, but they center on what Marks terms the "retreat from traditional teaching practices." He also offers a number of recommendations for rectifying the situation. These center, not surprisingly, on the restoration of more "traditional" practices of organizing schools and teaching children. If you'd like to read it for yourself, it seems you'll have to order (and pay for) a hard copy. (The price is ??7.50.) You might start by e-mailing [email protected] or surfing to  http://www.cps.org.uk/sen.htm where you'll find an on-line order form. You could also write to the Centre for Policy Studies, 57 Tufton Street, London SW1P3QL. Or you could phone 020 7222 4488 or fax 020 7222 4388.

Larry Cuban, Institute for Educational Leadership, September 2001

Writing for the Institute for Educational Leadership, Stanford Professor (and former school superintendent) Larry Cuban has written what he terms a "politically incorrect" ten-page essay about urban school leadership. It's politically incorrect on several fronts, and possibly just incorrect as well. The author seeks to distinguish urban school reform (and leadership) from other kinds, and winds up concluding that urban schools really are different on several dimensions. He makes some good points. Unfortunately, he also uses this "diversity" to raise doubts about standards-based reform as it applies to urban schools. If you'd like to read it (it's really short!), you can download a PDF version from http://www.iel.org/programs/21st/reports/urbanlead.pdf. You could also request a copy by e-mailing [email protected] or phoning (202) 822-8405 or writing the Institute for Educational Leadership, 1001 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 310, Washington, DC 20036.