In response to parents who were uncomfortable with the existing sex ed curriculum, one school district in Minnesota created a two-track program, offering an abstinence-only class alongside the traditional one, which covers contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and other hot topics. Parents could enroll their child in the class of their choice. The tale of how conflicts among members of the Osseo (Minn.) Human Sexuality Curriculum Advisory Committee led to divisions in the district's high schools and the community at large is told in "The Sex-Ed Divide," by Sharon Lerner, The American Prospect, special supplement, Fall 2001, http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/17/lerner-s.html

To get around uniform salary schedules that prevent schools and districts from paying extra for teachers with rare skills, these teachers could be hired on a contract basis and shared by many schools, suggests education policy thinker Paul Hill. An advanced physics teacher could work in two or three different high schools rather than just one, maybe even while still working part-time in industry. Hill suggests that the specialist teachers could be employed by teacher cooperatives, which would contract with districts and pay salaries and benefits to teachers based on scarcity of skills and individual performance. For more, see "Solving Shortages through Teacher Cooperatives," Hoover Institution Weekly Essay, September 17, 2001, http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/we/current/hill_0901.html

Neighborhood activists in Chicago think hiring illegal immigrants who taught in their homelands could be a solution to chronic teacher shortages in the Chicago Public Schools. Lawyers for the school district are researching the many hurdles facing this proposal; opponents argue that rewarding immigrants who have broken the law sends the wrong signal to children. For details, see "Answer to Teacher Shortage May Be Near," by Oscar Avila, Chicago Tribune, September 16, 2001. http://chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0109160392sep16.story

We need to stop thinking of teacher training as imparting a set of prefabricated solutions to predictable problems and instead encourage prospective teachers to delve into the subjects they love and then apprentice themselves to master teachers, according to Deborah Wadsworth of Public Agenda and Daniel Coleman of Bennington College. The authors describe an innovative program offered at Bennington, which has no education school or department and offers no traditional "methods" courses, but nonetheless trains liberal arts students as teachers. For more see "From Training to Transformation: How Liberal Arts Colleges Can Bring the Best Students into Teaching," American School Board Journal, October 2001 (not yet available online).

Carrie Lips and Jennifer Jacoby, Cato Institute
September 17, 2001

After major voucher initiatives in California and Michigan were strongly defeated at the ballot box last fall, many school-choice advocates looked to education tax credits as a less controversial means to expand education opportunities for children. In this Cato Institute Policy Analysis, Carrie Lips and Jennifer Jacoby analyze the impact of Arizona's $500 education tax credit. Signed into law in 1997, the measure allows taxpayers to receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to nonprofit organizations that award scholarships to private elementary and secondary schools. Critics claim the credit amounts to a subsidy of private schools that will drain the public purse. Lips and Jacoby found, however, that although the state initially loses money, the tax credit is at least revenue neutral, since the state also saves money by having fewer pupils to educate in the public schools. (This saving arises when scholarship recipients were not already attending private schools, which is not always the case.) Other critics charge that the tax credit is a perk for rich taxpayers rather than a tool to help children trapped in failing or unsafe schools. The authors found that between 1998 and 2000, Arizona taxpayers contributed about $32 million to 30 scholarship organizations, financing 19,000 scholarships for students who were overwhelmingly low-income. Anyone interested in a serious alternative to vouchers should view the report-which includes tables and charts showing who is using the credits and where their money is going-at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-414es.html, or order a copy for $6 from the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, DC, 20001; phone 800-767-1241; fax 202-842-3490.

College Board
2001

You may already know all you need about the College Board's recent release of the 2000-1 SAT scores. Even though this test remains controversial, though some colleges are backing away from it, and though everyone knows the test-taking population is not representative of the U.S. student population (it included 45% of 2001 high school graduates) and that it changes over time, these numbers are still widely used as a barometer of the performance of K-12 education. The short version: math was flat last year, verbal up a single point. The College Board wants you to think this is good news, part of a decade-long rising trend. Some of us remember, though, that this was the same decade when the Board opted to "re-center" all its scores because they had sagged so badly. Indeed, if you adjust for the re-centering and look over a longer period of time, the news is none too good, especially with respect to the verbal score, now at 506 compared to 530 in 1972. Math is somewhat rosier-514 today versus 509 in 1972-and surely better than its low of 492 in the early 1980's. It's also important to note, as Education Secretary Rod Paige commented, that the new data reveal as grave a black-white test score gap as ever-though both have risen. And the College Board itself remarked upon the evidence of rampant grade inflation: the GPA of test-takers in 2001 was 3.28, compared with 3.10 a decade earlier, and test-takers with A averages now number 41%, compared with 28% in 1991. Moreover, the SAT scores of the A students are themselves declining (not too surprising, as more youngsters are found in that sub-population). As Secretary Paige remarked, there's reason for concern if SAT scores are basically flat, NAEP scores are basically flat yet the kids themselves are getting ever rosier feedback from teachers and schools concerning their academic performance. In the penetrating query of a USA Today editorial, "What are parents supposed to think when their A-average children turn in test scores that are, well, average?" For more information you can contact the College Board staff at (212) 713-8502 or surf to http://www.collegeboard.org/press/senior01/html/082801.html.

Tom Loveless, The Brown Center on Education Policy, The Brookings Institution
September 2001

Last year's inaugural Brown Center Report on American Education-which found, inter alia, that many federally-recognized "blue ribbon" schools were none too effective-made quite a splash. (And federal officials responded, recently announcing that academic excellence will henceforth be the primary factor in selecting award recipients.) This year's report, authored by Brown Center Director Tom Loveless, may also ruffle a few education feathers. The first of its three sections takes a close look at reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)-analyzing NAEP's several versions-and draws different conclusions than much-publicized recent studies by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Education Goals Panel (NEGP). But the analysis is complicated, due to the fact that different versions of the NAEP test yield different results over time. In general, Loveless finds, math results are improving while reading is stagnating. He speculates that this is because "math achievement is more dependent on 'within-school' activities and responds more quickly to curriculum changes," while reading achievement is more highly influenced by activities and experiences outside the classroom, rendering it more difficult to change. In part two of the report, Loveless looks into international comparisons, briefly recounting America's dismal performance on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat (TIMSS-R), which placed the U.S. near the middle of world achievement. He then presents the findings of a new survey that the Brown Center conducted this past school year to determine how challenging American high school classes were for foreign exchange students compared to classes in the students' native countries. A whopping 56% of the 500 students surveyed labeled U.S. classes as much easier; 29% described them as a little easier. Just 11% found them harder. The report's final section seeks to estimate "the achievement gaps that urban schools must overcome to reach parity with their urban and suburban counterparts." It concludes that we cannot think of urban schools as monolithic because of the tremendous variation among them. Urban schools in the Sun Belt, for instance, tend to have higher achievement compared with their respective state averages than do schools elsewhere. There's a lot in this report; you will probably want your own copy. View it online at http://www.brookings.edu/GS/brown/bc_report/BC_Report_hp.htm or order one by contacting The Brown Center on Education Policy, The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036; telephone 202-797-6406; fax 202-797-2973.

High-achieving, high-poverty schools are no longer a novelty for elementary or middle school-aged kids, but helping disadvantaged youngsters succeed in high school has been more challenging. An article in Teacher Magazine describes the efforts of an organized group of parents in California to prevent their kids from becoming high school dropout statistics. Parents of Children of African Descent (PCAD) was formed by a group of Berkeley High School parents after they learned that half of the school's African American 9th graders were flunking core academic classes. Invited by the school's principal to develop an intervention plan, the parents created an alternative learning community within the high school where failing 9th graders would be taught in small classes by hand-picked teachers. Participating freshmen would be supported by student mentors and adult learning partners, and by their parents, who would agree to respond promptly to teachers' calls home. After the first year, there were signs that many students participating in the program had turned themselves around, but the program itself was discontinued for reasons that are easy to understand but hard to stomach. For more, see "Damage Control," by Meredith Maran, Teacher Magazine, August 2001, http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/tmstory.cfm?slug=01berkeley.h13

If your neighborhood school announces that it is introducing a new kind of instruction centered around student projects, you'll want to visit Teachers College Record's website, TCRecord.org, which this week reprises a 1921 symposium on the project method called "Dangers and Difficulties of the Project Method and How to Overcome Them." We recommend "Projects and Purposes in Teaching and Learning" by William C. Bagley, which discusses three dangers of relying on the project method: a reduction in our ability to retain what is learned, an exclusive emphasis on the instrumental value of knowledge, and a de-emphasis of non-purposive learning. Surf to http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=3983

Education issues aren't foremost in our minds today, but I will note that the K-12 concern that reached my ears most frequently in recent weeks is the vaunted "teacher shortage" that our schools are said to face. As summer vacation ended, the press was full of accounts of extraordinary measures that public-school systems were taking to ensure that their classrooms would have enough adults ready to receive the children. Teachers were imported from India and Austria. "Emergency" certificates were given to all sorts of people who had never taught before. Signing bonuses were paid to individual teachers-and sometimes finders' fees handed to the agencies that located them. Substitute teachers were readied for full-time classroom duty. And so forth.

Surely, the journalists said, this sort of thing will only worsen in coming years-and would I please confirm that? After all, doesn't America need to hire two million-or was it three million-new teachers in the next decade? I believe I was being invited to say that the only possible way to forestall this crisis would be to dump zillions of dollars into salaries, crash training programs and suchlike.

Talk about old-paradigm thinking! The most striking thing about the U.S. teacher "shortage" is the extent to which it has mostly been induced by rules, customs and practices that could be changed with a flick of the policymakers' wrists. But instead of changing the rules, we proclaim a crisis. One senses that some groups see their interests advanced by this.

Almost everyone who has looked at the "teacher shortage" has noticed that it's spotty, not universal. It's concentrated in certain subjects (e.g. math, science, special ed), in certain kinds of communities (inner cities, rural towns), and in certain parts of the country (sun-belt states with rapid enrollment increases and those that are swelling their teacher ranks as part of a class-size reduction strategy).

Many states still train far more teachers than their schools can hire. (A 1999 Pennsylvania study found that state producing 20,000 newly certified teachers annually even though it had just 5100 teacher openings per year.) Communities with static and shrinking enrollments face few shortages. Cushy suburbs in major metropolitan areas have plenty of applicants for nearly every classroom position. So do most charter and private schools-which are free to hire almost anyone they like. And it's common knowledge that the United States contains a vast "reserve pool" of teachers, people who trained for this occupation, or formerly engaged in it, but who for various reasons are not teaching today. In fact, most "new hires" in American schools are not freshly minted teachers bounding out of their preparation program. A third of them are former teachers returning to the profession while another quarter are teachers who prepared to teach at some earlier time but put it off.

Why are some schools having trouble finding enough grown-ups for their classrooms while others are awash in applicants? Look to the education field's bizarre policies and practices. Look, in particular, at four common practices that make precious little sense.

* Uniform salary schedules. It's crazy to pay the same salaries to people in high-demand subjects (e.g. high school science and math) as to those in high-supply fields (e.g. middle school social studies). It's insane to pay teachers in tough schools and challenging assignments the same as those in pleasant, low-risk settings. It's nuts to give identical compensation to outstanding and inept teachers, to hard workers and clock-watchers. Yet we do all those things in public education. If instead we developed a rational, market-sensitive compensation system for educators, shortages would wither.

* Certification. Today we make the public-school teaching force pass through the eye of the state-certification needle. Yet private and charter schools don't do that, nor do colleges and universities. Though there's mounting evidence that traditional certification has little bearing on classroom effectiveness, we still require it-and the ed-school based training that is its universal prerequisite. There's also mounting evidence that people who lack traditional certification-such as those in the Teach for America program-can be as effective as those with it, yet we're stingy with these alternate pathways into the classroom and grudging toward people who follow them. In most places, they must still take the Mickey-Mouse courses, though they may have longer in which to do so.

* Personnel management. In most communities, those running public schools-their principals-have little say over who teaches in them. Due to seniority systems, bumping rights, union contracts and centralized personnel offices, the principal has scant control over who is assigned to his school, who leaves, how much they're paid, how to reward excellence, how to cope with incompetence. No effective modern organization operates this way. It's a hold over from old-style industrial management and government civil-service procedures. But industry and government are moving beyond it. Only the public schools remain mired in it.

* People and capital. Whenever a school system has a spare dollar, it usually spends all hundred cents on teacher salaries. It almost never looks seriously at alternatives: at completely different ways of structuring schools (e.g. a few master teachers working with a large number of aides and tutors) or other education delivery systems (e.g. technology) that might boost productivity and effectiveness. So nothing changes. And "shortages" are proclaimed.

It's no bad thing to import well-educated people from other lands to teach young Americans. In this, public education is following the lead of Silicon Valley, which looked overseas when it couldn't find enough U.S. workers with the proper knowledge and skills. But we wouldn't have to do this if we made these few (albeit profound) policy changes. Our shortages would melt away. Our schools would improve. Our children would learn more. And our teachers would get better, thus easing our quality problem at the same time along with the quantity challenge.

Union and school district negotiators have reached a tentative agreement on changes in Cincinnati's teacher pay-for-performance plan, this in response to complaints from teachers about the evaluation process. Under this agreement, teachers will receive more training on how the evaluation system works, they'll be evaluated on more standards at a time, and more teachers with many years of experience will be able to opt out of having pay tied to their performance evaluations. It's unclear how significant these changes are, though allowing veteran teachers to opt out of the system is surely not a good sign. While Cincinnati is mostly known for its struggling performance-pay plan, the district is also embarking on a major overhaul of its neighborhood high schools this year, converting them into smaller, more specialized schools with the help of a $1.5 million grant from the federal government and a sizable grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a big believer in small schools). The high school reform effort is described in a long article by Jennifer Mrozowski in The Cincinnati Enquirer. In a separate article, she looks at the impact of a scathing report on the schools that was released by Cincinnati's business community a decade ago. Over the years, the district has embraced many of the suggestions offered by the CEOs who drafted the report, including slashing expenditures for district administration from 13 percent of the budget to 5 percent, hiring a business executive to supervise the school system's business operations, and creating a training facility for teachers and principals. What's the upshot of all this reform activity? While test scores in Cincinnati have risen some in recent years, Ohio still rates the district an "academic emergency" based on its test scores and graduation and attendance rates.

"Teachers, CPS Alter Pay-for-Performance Plan," by Jennifer Mrozowski, The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 1, 2001, http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2001/09/01/loc_teachers_cps_alter.html

"Breaking Down Schools to Build Them Up," by Jennifer Mrozowski, The Cincinnati Enquirer, August 26, 2001, http://enquirer.com/editions/2001/08/26/loc_breaking_down.html

"City School Reforms Began with Buenger," by Jennifer Mrozowski, The Cincinnati Enquirer, September 4, 2001, http://enquirer.com/editions/2001/09/04/loc_city_school_reforms.html

On September 11 at 8:45 a.m., I was having a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper when I heard a tremendous boom behind me. I live in Brooklyn, about three city blocks from New York Harbor, and directly across the Harbor from my neighborhood is New York City's financial district.

At first I thought nothing of it (things happen in a city this big without your ever knowing where or what they were). Then a few minutes later, a friend called from work to tell me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV for a minute, leashed one of my dogs, and ran to the waterfront. I got there just in time to see the second plane hit the second tower. Flames and smoke were pouring from both towers, against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. About six other people--all strangers--stood watching with me, and everyone was in shock, some crying. Someone said, "This is terrorism," and one woman began sobbing. The wind was blowing in our direction, and the sky was filled with little bits of paper, like confetti in a ticker-tape parade; it was the paper from people's desks at the World Trade Center.

It was a terrible and frightening sight, and I could not stand to watch the flames, knowing that people were dying as I stood watching. I returned to my home and watched on TV. When the towers began collapsing an hour later, the sky--which had been so beautiful--began to darken with the heavy smoke. As the wind continued to blow east towards our neighborhood, ash rained down on the local streets all day and the air was acrid with the smell of fire and chemical odors that I could not identify.

The spirit of the people of this city, known for its toughness, was an amazing demonstration of civic cooperation. I went to the nearest hospital with two friends to donate blood; there we were sent to Metrotech Center, which is closer to the Brooklyn Bridge; and once we got to Metrotech, we ran into other neighbors, who told us that the lines to donate blood were so long that newcomers were turned away. My daughter-in-law, in upper Manhattan, was also turned away because so many people turned out to donate blood, overwhelming the capacity of the emergency centers.

With the subways shut down and the bridges and tunnels closed, people in the neighborhood walked home from their jobs in Manhattan. Some walked five, seven, ten miles. No one complained.

Like many other Americans, I have been glued to the television. Unlike others, I have gone occasionally to the harbor, to see what is happening. The most startling fact is that the towers are gone. Where they used to be is a huge plume of smoke. Tonight, I went to walk on "The Promenade," which looks directly at the lower Manhattan financial district. About 1,000 other people were there, sitting, walking, watching. I don't know what they were watching for; I don't know what I was watching for. Just to see the remarkably sad sight of the Manhattan skyline without the landmark twin towers.

There are no saving graces to this horror and devastation. But in its midst, I feel proud of my fellow New Yorkers. Of their self-discipline; their caring for others; and in the case of the hundreds of heroic rescue workers who sacrificed their lives while trying to find survivors, their incredible courage.