In this week's Weekly Standard, former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and Boston University Ed School Dean Edwin J. Delattre take aim at the character education program included in the education bills now before Congress. They suggest that the main problem lies in the whole idea of character education as a package-a lesson with its accompanying video and worksheet-that schools purchase, train teachers to use, and then evaluate. Instead of teaching about character in a way that is grafted onto the formal curriculum, schools should pay more attention to forming character, which occurs quietly and steadily through the ordinary workings of good schools. For more see "Character, the Old-Fashioned Way," The Weekly Standard, August 20/27, 2001. (Not available online.)

Time magazine and other national media have recently featured the work of a program called "New Leaders for New Schools," which is preparing 15 people to become school principals. This is most certainly a valuable activity and it deserves commendation if, in fact, the 15 people do someday turn out to be not only principals but good principals. Of course, we won't know the answer to that question for several years.

Meanwhile, completely unnoticed by the national media, the New York City public school system has launched a startlingly effective program that is training nearly 400 new principals. Although not usually known in recent years for its innovative programs, the NYC schools are sponsoring a principal development effort whose purpose is to improve and retain its newest principals, those who have been on the job for two years or less.

Its founder and leader, Mary Butz, is a 33-year veteran of the NYC school system who previously created her own small public high school (Manhattan Village Academy). Invited last fall by Chancellor Harold O. Levy to tackle the problem of training new principals, Butz designed an innovative program that got off the ground this past spring and summer.

First, she selected a corps of 40 experienced principals who are known as "the Distinguished Faculty." These 40 became mentors for nearly 400 newly assigned principals.

During the spring, mentors and mentees exchanged visits and worked through the complexities of running an urban public school. In July, the Distinguished Faculty conducted two weeks of workshops for the new principals, focusing on real-time issues such as data analysis, budgeting, curriculum, school safety, and other hands-on matters that principals confront on a daily basis.

This fall, the number of new principals will expand to nearly 500 as old hands retire from the school system. The professional development program will continue this year, and new principals now know that they have a senior colleague who will help them when they need it. The reward for the Distinguished Faculty who have participated is the collegiality that they have gained as well as the opportunity to help those who will follow them in the school system.

Everyone involved in this program has been enthusiastic about what has been accomplished in a short period of time with a minimal budget. Butz, who is a friend of mine, knows how lonely principals are and how much they need someone to turn to for help who is not evaluating their performance. Her ability to shape this initiative in a matter of months, within a bureaucracy not known for speed or compassion, has been a minor miracle.

Perhaps more important, Mary Butz has developed a national model that every school district should be encouraged to borrow. She can be reached at the NYC Board of Education at 718-935-3058.

Education journalist Jay Mathews also touches on how to get more good principals in "Good Principals Keep Good Teachers," by Jay Mathews, WashingtonPost.com, August 14, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9394-2001Aug14.html

In a piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and former president of Brown University argues that we should stop blaming teachers for their professional shortcomings and start pointing fingers at the universities and colleges that train them.

Gregorian notes that, while our nation's ed schools train more than enough teachers each year, more than 30 percent of all new teachers-and up to 50 percent of those in large, urban districts-leave teaching within 5 years. One of the main reasons they give for leaving is that they were inadequately prepared for the job.

Why are ed schools doing such a lousy job of preparing teachers? Gregorian offers a few possible explanations. Ed schools lower their standards and pile on course requirements in order to keep enrollments up so that they can make their financial ends meet. Within ed schools, teacher training is considered low-prestige, entry-level work meant for junior faculty, part-time professors and teaching assistants, many of whom themselves have little or no classroom teaching experience.

Regardless of the cause of today's weak teacher preparation, there is a growing consensus that boosting teacher quality is a key to better schools, and Gregorian expresses hope that the present crisis will motivate us to make real changes. Among the changes he suggests: 1) universities should close substandard ed schools or give them the support they need to become first-rate, 2) colleges should require teachers to major in academic subjects, not education, and 3) higher ed leaders should demand more rigorous licensing systems while ending their opposition to sound alternative certification programs. In conclusion, Gregorian urges colleges to make teacher education their central preoccupation.

The main thing missing from his proposals is any real lever for change. Higher ed leaders have been willing to overlook ineffective schools of education on their campuses for so long that it is hard to hold great hope for a revolution in teacher education mounted from within the university. Instead, we should put market forces to work. If we gave school principals the ability to hire the most qualified people they can find, regardless of whether the prospective teachers have been trained in ed schools, then ed schools would have to offer valuable services or they'd lose their customers. The surest way to improve ed schools is to strip them of their near-monopoly on training and licensing teachers and force their graduates to compete with other college graduates, licensed or not, for teaching positions in U.S. public schools.

"Teacher Education Must Become Colleges' Central Preoccupation," by Vartan Gregorian, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 17, 2001 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i49/49b00701.htm (available to subscribers only)

Just for the Kids-the nonprofit group best known for making school-level accountability data available in an innovative, user-friendly website-is now teaming with the Education Commission of the States and the University of Texas to launch the National Center for Accountability. The Center hopes to create databases like the one in Texas-which allows parents and researchers to identify high-performing schools and to compare schools with similar socioeconomic characteristics-in other states and to expand research into what makes schools succeed, as well as studying all aspects of accountability and ways of closing the achievement gap. For more see "Center would focus on schools," by Linda Wertheimer, Dallas Morning News, August 9, 2001, http://www.dallasnews.com/texas_southwest/438453_accountability.html To check out the outstanding Just for the Kids website, surf to http://www.just4kids.org

Pizza Hut offers free pizza to students who read a certain number of books while rival Domino's rewards schools with free books if the school community buys pizza from its outlets. Do these deals harm students by commercializing schools, as critics suggest? In an article in Policy Review, Andrew Stark explores the difference between these two arrangements, along the way debunking some myths about the mingling of the corporate world with public education. He suggests that the Pizza Hut arrangement resembles the use of Channel One in schools, where the school offers public space for the company to market its own product to a captive audience. By contrast, the Domino's arrangement relies on the students' and parents' role as private-market consumers. The school community chooses which commodities to purchase and the corporation adopts a philanthropic role, providing a public good. Stark recognizes that these lines are sometimes blurred but admonishes critics who would view all commercialism in schools through a single lens. To read more go to "Pizza Hut, Domino's and the Public Schools" by Andrew Stark, Policy Review, August and September 2001, http://www.policyreview.org/AUG01/stark.html

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Bruno V. Manno, and Gregg Vanourek

While we're on the subject of charter schools, the Princeton University Press has just issued the paperback edition of this study by Bruno Manno, Gregg Vanourek and myself, incorporating a new preface that updates some of the data and discusses some recent developments in the charter world. Especially if you waited because the hardcover version was a mite dear, you may want to have a look now. The book is based on extensive fieldwork in charter schools around the country and quite a lot of data gathering. It's bullish but not sanguine about the potential of charter schools to transform U.S. public education. The ISBN (for the paperback edition) is ISBN: 0-691-09008-4. You can get it directly from the publisher (surf to http://www.pup.princeton.edu/titles/6783.html) or from the usual sources of good books.

Harvard University Press

Berkeley public policy professor Bruce Fuller edited this collection of mostly skeptical essays about charter schools. He also penned the two bookend essays himself, and they're fairly thoughtful. Between them you'll find six case studies of charter schools that, Fuller claims, "capture the breadth of the movement, replete with all its beauty marks and warts." While I believe most of the authors were more alert to warts than dimples, the school profiles are evocative and often discerning. They also help evoke the complexity and diversity of charter schools. 284 pages long, its ISBN is 0-674-00325-X. Harvard University Press is the publisher. Its web address is www.hup.harvard.edu.

Hoover Institution

Terry Moe of the Hoover Institution is the editor of this collection of essays comprising the first major project of Hoover's Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. It contains eleven essays, one per task force member (including yours truly) that seek to introduce the "general reader" to key topics and issues in American education. These include school spending (Eric Hanushek), school achievement (Herb Walberg), how the system works (John Chubb), "American Traditions of Education" (Diane Ravitch), teacher unions (Moe), curriculum (E.D. Hirsch), school choice (Paul Peterson) and so on. (My essay is on teachers.) This 324-page tome can be gotten from Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, Stanford CA. The ISBN is 0-8179-9942-6. You can also surf to www.hoover.org though the book is so new I can't yet find it on the website.

National Center for Education Statistics

The National Center for Education Statistics recently issued this report on NAEP results in civics, based on exams administered a decade apart. This is not a conventional NAEP report. Rather than reporting student results in relation to "scale scores" or "achievement levels," it takes a series of multiple-choice questions that were asked in both years and shows how students did on them. It also supplies some simple aggregate statistics on, for example, what percentage(s) of questions were correctly answered by various groups of kids (e.g. by gender, race) in the two different years. You can find a wealth of "shocking" specifics. (For example, just half the 12th graders in 1998-down from 59 percent in 1988-know that the "We hold these truths to be self-evident...Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" sentence comes from the Declaration of Independence. Only two-fifths of eighth graders know that the Supreme Court has authority to determine the constitutionality of a law. And so forth.) As for general trends, the big one can be summarized in a four-letter word: FLAT. Fourth graders did better in 1998 than in 1988, while 8th graders did worse and 12th graders showed no statistically significant change in overall performance. If you'd like your own copy of this 73-page document, you might phone the Education Department's Publications Center at (877) 433-7827. You could also write to that center at P.O. Box 1398, Jessup, MD 20784, you could surf to http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001452, or you might harass the relevant staffer, Patricia Dabbs, at (202) 502-7332.

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

Last month, Laura Bush hosted a White House summit on early childhood cognitive development, and the American Federation of Teachers recently proposed preschool access for all children in the United States, making early childhood education a hot topic at least in Washington. In this comprehensive and timely report, the OECD examines how policies, services, families, and communities support early childhood development and learning in 12 countries. It addresses general trends that have shaped policy during the last two years, how these trends and policies affect cultural views on early childhood, and finally, how those views bounce back and affect policy. Some of the larger trends include a greater portion of children spending the first few years of their life in multiple settings with multiple caregivers, more single-parent families, increased cultural and linguistic diversity among small children, and greater risk of social exclusion for children living in poverty. These trends resulted in a movement toward universal pre-school access, an increase in the quality of service providers, an exploration of funding strategies, the development of pedagogical frameworks, and attempts to engage parents and the community. The OECD offers an overview of early childhood education and care for each member country, complete with comparison graphs and statistics. It concludes with policy recommendations, including universal access, greater public investment and assurance of high quality providers. To order a copy or download a .pdf file, go to http://electrade.gfi.fr/cgi-bin/OECDBookShop.storefront. The purchase price is $40.00.