An examination of pass-fail records from tests of basic skills and subject knowledge taken by Illinois teachers over the last thirteen years revealed that 5,243 current teachers had failed at least one exam, even though these tests are pitched at an extremely low level. Most teachers eventually pass all tests, but 868 people now teaching in Illinois schools have yet to pass the state's basic skills test. Children in high-poverty schools are roughly five times more likely to be taught by teachers who stumbled in efforts to pass these tests. After this multi-part series on teacher tests was published by the Chicago Sun-Times last week, Gov. George Ryan asked the state board of education to investigate the issues raised by the analysis.

"5,243 Illinois teachers failed key exams," by Rosalind Rossi, Becky Beaupre and Kate N. Grossman, Chicago Sun Times, September 6, 2001, http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-main06.html

Also in this series were: "Kids take the test, say it's too easy" (Sept. 6); "Poorest kids often wind up with the weakest teachers" (Sept. 7); "Why are teacher tests secret? politicians ask" (Sept. 7); "Failing teachers spur hearings" (Sept. 9); "Other states do it better" (Sept. 9)

In New Jersey, students who flunk the state's exit exam can still receive a high school diploma if they earn passing marks on a series of performance assessment tasks drawn up by the state. Last year, 6100 students-nearly 9 percent of graduates-got their diplomas this way. Twenty-two schools in poor urban districts awarded at least 30 percent of their diplomas through the performance assessment process; five schools issued more than half of their diplomas this way. School officials defend the option as important for students who test poorly or need extra help, but Paul Reville of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform notes "You could argue that this is going back to essentially a two-tiered, tracked system. That was precisely what the standards movement was trying to move away from." It is impossible to determine whether the performance assessment is equivalent to the state tests because New Jersey officials refuse to release any sample performance tasks for security reasons. For details, see "Special Program Gives Kids Another Chance to Pass," by Deborah Yaffe, Gannett State Bureau/INjersey.com, September 2, 2001, http://www.injersey.com/news/story2000/0,20905,440661,00.html

The Brookings Institution has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a "National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education." According to The Washington Post, the commission will be managed by Paul Hill and Tom Loveless, and will tackle issues surrounding school choice such as how it affects school quality and student learning and whether it affects poor and minority access to strong public schools. (Noted in "The Ideas Industry," by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, September 11, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/fedpage/columns/ideasindustry/A7050-2001Sep10.html)

Alan Siegel
2001

The outstanding performance of Japanese students on the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) examinations has prompted numerous studies of Japanese teaching practices by researchers eager to duplicate such success in their own countries' classrooms. Now N.Y.U. professor Alan Siegel has taken a look at videotaped lessons from TIMSS classroom studies in an effort to spot the salient features of Japanese teaching. Siegel walks the reader through sample Japanese geometry and algebra lessons full of "deep and rich" content, noting the teachers' skill at eliciting and prompting responses from students. Instead of extensive group work and "discovery-based learning," which have taken hold in many U.S. schools, he says the "grapple and tell" method is extensively used in Japan. Here, students struggle with a problem in class-individually or in small groups-often without finding a solution. Then, a master teacher presents "every step of [the] solution without divulging the answer," thereby helping students to "learn to think deeply." Siegel also rebuts some misleading claims by other studies of Japanese pedagogy, such as the assertion that Japanese teachers "come closer to implementing the spirit of current ideas advanced by U.S. reformers than do U.S. teachers." You can access the study online at http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/siegel/ST11.pdf

Department for Education and Skills, UK
2001

Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has published a 74 page "white paper" that sets forth the direction it intends to move British primary-secondary education during Blair's second term. The emphasis is on high schools. The rhetorical and policy thrust-this may not surprise you-is a blend of standards, accountability, flexibility and diversity, including the creation of distinctive new schools, some of them religious. But the main controversy centers on the government's plan to outsource failing schools to private operators and to encourage other schools to outsource various services. Not bad for a Labour Government, one is tempted to say. Yet there may be less to it than meets the eye. When a school voluntarily teams up with an outside organization, for example, its staff must remain government employees. Even when a failing school is involuntarily "outsourced" to a private operator, its staff, again, may opt to remain public employees rather than employees of the private operator. And while a successful school can gain some freedom with respect to teacher pay and working conditions, there will be no individual contracts, i.e. the group-think collective-bargaining framework remains intact. In sum, there are many good ideas here but in almost every instance the government seems to have begun its journey with one leg intentionally broken. Still, we wish them well-K-12 education in Britain needs improvement as badly as in the U.S.-and will be watching with interest. To get a copy of Schools Achieving Success, the fastest route is to surf to http://www.dfes.gov.uk/achievingsuccess.

Indiana Center for Evaluation
September 2001

As is well known, Cleveland is one of two cities in the U.S. with publicly funded scholarships (aka vouchers) available to low-income children whose families would like to send them to private schools. About 4000 youngsters now participate. From the program's beginning (1996-97), one of the organizations evaluating it (in this case at the behest of the state of Ohio) has been the Indiana Center for Evaluation, led by Kim Metcalf. They have now published a second major study of the Cleveland program, this one covering three school years (ending in 2000) and focusing on younger children who entered (and didn't enter) the program as kindergartners or first graders. The study looked at their achievement (and various other factors) at the beginning of first grade, the end of first grade and the end of second grade. The study is complex because it seeks to compare four groups of youngsters and to draw conclusions about the scholarship program's impact on them over two or three years. Aficionados of voucher research will want to see for themselves. The main conclusions are ambiguous. It turns out that the student populations were very similar (though the scholarship users were somewhat less apt to be minorities), that their teachers were very similar (on the few dimensions that were examined), and that their academic achievement shows no clear pattern. All groups improved as they went through school. Scholarship youngsters who began in kindergarten did better than non-scholarship (i.e. public school) students as of first grade but by the end of second grade the differences were statistically insignificant. Nobody can say with certainty (at least not based on these data) whether the program is "working", but it's not hurting (and the cost per student is considerably less than that of the Cleveland public schools). As one often hears, more research would seem to be called for. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court may take the First Amendment case this fall. If so, we may learn more about the program's constitutionality even as we await further data on its efficacy. You can get an 11-page summary and/or the 63-page technical report from the Indiana Center for Evaluation, Smith Research Center, 2805 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47408. Phone (800) 511-6575. Fax (812) 856-5890. E-mail [email protected]. Surf to http://www.indiana.edu/~iuice.

U.S. Department of Education
2001

As we near the final stage of the long-pending E.S.E.A. reauthorization process in Congress, we find ourselves presented with a long-awaited study of today's Title I schools, conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) by the firms Westat and Policy Studies Associates. This is not so much an evaluation of the Title I program itself (which some people insist isn't really a "program" so much as a "funding stream") as it is a study of 71 high-poverty schools and a group of their students who moved from third to fifth grade during the course of this longitudinal project. The data were gathered between 1996 and 1999 as policy changes dictated in the 1994 E.S.E.A. amendments were beginning to kick in. The report consists mostly of information about which school policies and instructional practices seem to be related to greater and lesser pupil achievement, and you may well want to plunge into this sea yourself. (The executive summary-Volume I-is 16 pages; the technical report-Volume II-runs to 120 pages.) Two points struck me. First, not much gap-closing occurred between third and fifth grade for Title I students attending these schools. They were about as far behind national (and urban) norms in reading and math at the end of the multi-year study as at the beginning. In other words, nothing that was tried really worked very well. Second, the variables that the researchers opted to examine (for their impact on student learning) were but a handful of those they might have studied or that might make a difference. For example, they considered how highly teachers rated their professional development but never looked at any gauges of teacher knowledge, experience or competence. They also sought out instructional arrangements that the profession tends to favor (e.g. NCTM math, "exploration in instruction") but didn't look to see whether a school's curriculum or pedagogy was based on anything with proven efficacy. (NCTM math, by the way, showed a negative effect in high-poverty schools, a positive effect in less poor schools.) Finally, let us note that it took the analysts two years to crank out their analysis and that this report emerged after Senate and House had taken action on the current reauthorization. There have been previous examples of the Department's evaluation shop timing the release of its studies just a little too cleverly-so that they do or don't impact pending policy choices. One wonders if we're looking at another example of that. If you want to see for yourself, the document code is Doc#2001-20 and you can write to ED Pubs, Editorial Publications Center, U.S. Department of Education, P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20794. You could also e-mail [email protected]. You could fax (301) 470-1244, phone (877) 433-7827 or surf to www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs.html or www.ed.gov/offices/OUS/PES/eval.html.

Most children who live in the Hollywood Hills go to private schools, but a small group of parents from that affluent Los Angeles neighborhood decided two years ago that they might like to send their kids to the local public school. First, though, they wanted to make sure that it would be suitable for their sons and daughters, so they began meeting with the principal and teachers at this school, which then served mostly youngsters from the other side of the tracks, including the children of recent immigrants who work as gardeners, nannies, and housekeepers for families in the Hills. The wealthy parents hoped to launch a series of projects to improve the school, but found that its staff and some parents of kids attending it thought it was already doing a pretty good job, even though the school had received a ranking of just 2 (out of 10) on the latest state performance index. In a 6,000 word story that appeared on page 1 of The Wall Street Journal, Lisa Bannon described the culture clash that ensued. Read "What Happened When Well-to-Do Parents Tried to Prep a Public School for Their Kids," August 23, 2001, http://interactive.wsj.com/fr/emailthis/retrieve.cgi?id=SB998511295703108758.djm (may only be available to subscribers at this point).

Henry Levin's National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, based at Teachers College, Columbia University, hasn't always done important and well-balanced work, but it's certainly been prolific. What's more, several of the recent "occasional papers" now available on its burgeoning website strike us as worth knowing about, maybe even reading.

• Can Public Policy Affect Private School Cream-Skimming? Despite its "have you stopped beating your wife" title, this is an interesting analysis (I can't tell you how long because the pages aren't numbered but it feels like about 40) by economists David Figlio (University of Florida) and Joe Stone (University of Oregon). Using what they describe as a "unique" data set-from the National Education Longitudinal Survey-they conclude that a wide array of public policies influences who ends up going to private (and, for that matter, public) schools in a given community. This naturally leads to wide-ranging policy implications. For example, say the authors, "fighting crime successfully and lowering the violent crime rate will likely improve the ability of public schools to retain higher socio-economic status and ability students and lessen the disparity in peer groups between the public and private sectors." Some of us might think this obvious. But it's good to have empirical analysis to buttress a normal human impulse: the instinct of parents to weigh a variety of environmental, economic, contextual and educational factors in choosing a school for their child. To the extent that policy makers want to affect school choices, therefore, they are well advised to understand how many different polices bear on those decisions. (Occasional paper #31.)
• Tuition Tax Credits: What do we know so far? British economist (and University of South Carolina business school professor) Clive Belfield has penned a short (12 page) paper on the economics of tuition tax credits, a topic that hasn't elicited much research, though such credits are on the books in (Belfield says) five states. Here he reviews what evidence he could lay his hands on and supplies some added analysis. Some of his conclusions will be more pleasing to tax-credit advocates than others. Using a "comprehensive" framework, he finds some important positives (e.g. enhanced freedom, greater efficiency) as well as negatives (greater segregation, diminished social cohesion). The purely economic analysis is largely negative. The author also seems quite off base in his explanation of the role of tax credits in the pending federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act amendments. He seems to think they're there. I certainly can't find them! (Occasional paper #33.)
• The Effects of Catholic Schools on Religiosity, Education, and Competition. Despite its mega-title, this is just a 38-page paper, written by DePaul economist William Sander (no, not the statistician Bill Sanders). In this domain, of course, there's been much previous research. Sander pokes into some of it and does some data analysis of his own, again using the Privatization Center's four "comprehensive" criteria for evaluating private schools and programs: freedom of choice, efficiency, equity and social cohesion. (This paper doesn't actually tackle the fourth of these.) Catholic schools, in Sander's analysis, fare well on freedom and reasonably well on equity, due to their positive effects on low income and minority students. His analysis of their "productive efficiency" leads to what he terms a "mixed" finding. I don't find that part of the paper very persuasive or thorough, however. Have a look for yourself, but be warned that it's fairly technical. (Occasional paper #32.)

Papers are available from the website of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at http://www.ncspe.org/ (click on "Occasional Papers" for a list of titles). The Center can also be reached at 212-678-3259.

As if House and Senate conferees didn't already face enough difficulties in creating a fair definition of "adequate yearly progress" for the new ESEA, an article in this month's Washington Monthly explains how high rates of student mobility can doom an otherwise solid accountability system. According to a GAO study, one out of every six U.S. third-graders has attended three or more schools since entering first grade, and a New York Times investigation found that 40 percent of the students in a typical New York City classroom changed schools over the course of the year. Unless an accountability system has some way of dealing with highly mobile students, schools may be sanctioned for failing to educate kids who have barely spent any time on their premises. For more, see "Student Movement: The Fatal Flaw in the Bush Education Plan," by Thad Hall, Washington Monthly, September 2001, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0109.hall.html