Paige Nonsense

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / July 5, 2001

I was out of the country last week and expected to return to find an end to the media frenzy about Education Secretary Rod Paige being (a) unhappy with his job, (b) "out of the policy loop" and (c) on the verge of quitting. Alas, this foolishness seemed, if anything, to have intensified.

Having lived in Washington forever, I know this sort of thing occurs from time to time. Think of it as a form of political fiction writing or rumor mongering. The usual formula is to allege a rift or conflict between a senior official and the White House (or sometimes between White House aides), then make much ado about its significance and implications, using this occasion to cast the incumbent administration in a bad light.

These stories have three possible sources. The likeliest is journalists with little better to do, a yen to make trouble, keen awareness that gossipy stories about people draw more readers than dense articles about policy, and, usually, some anonymous source willing to abet this plan by saying something provocative off the record. Second, opponents of the administration (who may, of course, include the journalists and/or their sources) may deploy this tactic for their own purposes of policy or politics. Third, it's possible that someone within the administration-conceivably the person alleged to be unhappy-is using this public mechanism as a way to "send a message" into the Oval Office.

Whence came the Paige rumors? We'll never know for

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Paige Nonsense

Affirmative action for speakers of second languages

July 5, 2001

A year after the University of California system made changes in its admissions policy designed to increase campus diversity, Hispanic admissions soared 18%. But many of these newly admitted students may have benefited from a loophole in the admissions policy that has created an unintended reward for speakers of second languages, reports Daniel Golden in a June 26 article in the Wall Street Journal.

The U.C. system began this year to assign increased weight to the SAT II achievement tests and less to SAT I scores. Students are now required to take SAT II exams in writing, math, and a third subject of their choice, which can include foreign languages. Golden reports that many applicants from immigrant homes who are native speakers of other languages are improving their prospects for admission by acing a language test meant for students whose first tongue is English. At Jefferson High, for instance, a predominantly Hispanic, low-achieving school in Los Angeles, students averaged 715 out of 800 on the Spanish exam but 390 on the verbal SAT and 402 on the math SAT.

There are other winners besides Hispanic students. Golden found that Asian-Americans whose first language isn't English scored 761 last year on the SAT II Chinese test, 752 on Korean, and 735 on Japanese. Steven A. Holmes reports in a July 1 commentary in the New York Times that the College Board has added new SAT II tests in foreign languages in response

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Affirmative action for speakers of second languages

Report card on report cards

July 5, 2001

Nearly all states post report cards on the internet that show parents (and others) how their children's schools are doing, but some of these report cards are more useful than others. The Heritage Foundation has created a web site that highlights the 10 best internet-based school report cards, explains why such measures are important, and includes links to school report cards in all the states. Check it out at http://www.heritage.org/reportcards/

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Report card on report cards

Summer reading from the AFT

July 5, 2001

The summer issue of the American Federation of Teacher's magazine, American Educator, has several must-read articles. E.D. Hirsch explains that closing the achievement gap in reading will require that kids learn decoding skills and also that they work their way through a curriculum that develops knowledge of academic subjects; Louisa Moats describes what it takes to produce reading gains that endure beyond 4th grade; H. Wu shows how the proper study of fractions prepares students for algebra; and Diane Ravitch resurrects William Chandler Bagley, who was wrongly branded a reactionary for insisting-75 years ago-that all children should learn challenging academic material. American Educator is one of our favorite publications-issue after issue is genuinely worth reading-and we salute editor Liz McPike on another terrific example of journalistic excellence and education seriousness. If you'd like a copy of one article or the whole summer issue, send a fax to the American Educator (attn: Yomica) at 202-879-4534.

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Summer reading from the AFT

Voucher researchers defend their turf

July 5, 2001

School choice researchers and critics discuss the strengths and weaknesses of studies analyzing the effects of vouchers in "The Problem With Studying Vouchers," by D.W. Miller, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 13, 2001 (Article is available only to subscribers.)

(For more on this topic, see "Voucher Vortex," by David Glenn, Lingua Franca, May/June 2001 (not available at http://www.linguafranca.com, but you can order a copy of the magazine))

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Voucher researchers defend their turf

Beating the Odds: A City-by-City Analysis of Student Performance and Achievement Gaps on State Assessments

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 7, 2005

When we flagged this report some weeks back, we had seen only the executive summary. Now we have the full 240-page tome and are impressed enough to mention it again. Carefully prepared by the Council of the Great City Schools, this is a painstaking analysis of how the Council's 55 member districts (including most of the country's major cities) have done in recent years as gauged primarily by their states' tests. We've never seen anything so detailed and candid-including welcome honesty about the limits of these data and the difficulties of using them for comparisons. The good news is that many of the nation's urban districts are posting significant gains in math and reading and are reducing achievement gaps between white and minority students. Twenty-three urban districts have been making faster gains in math than the state average in at least half the grades tested, while seventeen posted reading gains that exceeded the state average. (Many, of course, still lag well behind their states' averages, and some are weakening vis-?-vis their states.) There is a raft of data here that you probably cannot get anywhere else, as well as a helpful statistical spotlight on the actual condition of urban education in America today. Kudos to the Council for making it available. It can be ordered from the Council for $20 plus $5 shipping by calling 202-393-2427, writing 1301 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Suite 702, Washington, DC 20004 or surfing to

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Beating the Odds: A City-by-City Analysis of Student Performance and Achievement Gaps on State Assessments

High Student Achievement: How Six School Districts Changed into High-Performing Systems

Karen Baker / July 5, 2001

The Educational Research Service's new study of high-performing districts expands on an appraisal of high-performing schools that it published three years ago. This one highlights four districts: Brazosport Independent School District (in Clute, Texas); Twin Falls School District (in Idaho); Ysleta Independent School District (in El Paso); and Barbour County School District (in Philippi, West Virginia). All four districts serve a significant number of low-income children, yet showed significant gains in student achievement over the past five years. The study found an unsurprising correlation between strong leadership, a culture of high expectations, clearly articulated goals and standards, and a combination of empowerment and accountability among school staff and student achievement. A key factor contributing to district success, however, was item-level analysis of assessment results so as to identify specific weaknesses in students' knowledge and skills. This helped schools to focus classroom and individual instruction on improving these areas. Extensive efforts to provide immediate and appropriate corrective instruction contributed to the impressive score gains that these four districts made. To order a copy of the report, surf to http://www.ers.org/CATALOG/description.phtml?II=WS-0420&UID=2001070509040164.12.103.182 or contact the Educational Research Service at 1-800-791-9308.

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High Student Achievement: How Six School Districts Changed into High-Performing Systems

Privatizing Education: Can the Marketplace Deliver Choice, Efficiency, Equity, and Social Cohesion?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / July 5, 2001

Long-time education policy analyst Henry M. Levin now heads the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, based at Teachers College, Columbia. That center held its kick-off conference in April 1999. The conference papers have now been collected in this volume, which Levin edited. Fourteen of them range across a wide variety of issues that bear, in varying degrees and from diverse perspectives, on the "privatization" debate in education. As with any edited volume, they also vary in quality, insight and value. Since this is an agenda-setting volume for Levin's center, it doesn't purport to offer general conclusions or policy advice. If you'd like to take a look, the ISBN is 0813366402. The publisher is Westview Press, located at 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301 and on the web at www.westviewpress.com.

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Privatizing Education: Can the Marketplace Deliver Choice, Efficiency, Equity, and Social Cohesion?

School Choice in New Zealand: Sixteen Years of Unprecedented Success

Charles R. Hokanson, Jr. / July 5, 2001

Children First America has issued an eight-page brief describing bold reforms that the Kiwis have made to their education system over the past decade and a half. New Zealand's powerful, unresponsive, and highly bureaucratic Ministry of Education was transformed into a body that hands block grants to local boards of trustees (one per school) and audits school performance against the requirements written into each school's charter by its own board. Every New Zealand public school and most private schools are now versions of "charter schools," and district-level boards have been eliminated. Private schools may get state funding equivalent to public schools (including capital funding), provided they meet certain facility code standards, teach the core curriculum, and instruct students for the prescribed number of days each school year. Authors Matthew Ladner of Children First America and Maurice McTigue, a former New Zealand Cabinet Minister, briefly examine what test scores reveal about the efficacy of these Antipodean reforms. The 1995 TIMSS math results show that New Zealand's 12th graders scored 22 points above the international average, while U.S. seniors scored 39 points below. Ladner and McTigue conclude their brief with a critique of U.S. authors Edward Fiske and Helen Ladd's recent book on school choice in New Zealand, When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale. This book asserts that school competition in New Zealand has not improved those schools that lost enrollments as a result of the nation's reforms. Ladner and McTigue argue

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School Choice in New Zealand: Sixteen Years of Unprecedented Success

Testing Teacher Candidates: The Role of Licensure Tests in Improving Teacher Quality

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / July 5, 2001

The National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council is at it again, taking money from the (Clinton) Department of Education to advance the education profession's conventional wisdom while claiming to be engaged in serious analysis. Someone at the Department evidently took it into his/her head in 1999 to ask the Academy to examine the tests that many states use as part of the selection, screening and licensure of new teachers. (This was evidently triggered at least partly by Congress's insistence that states begin to report passing rates on these tests for each of their teacher preparation programs.) The Academy empanelled a fifteen member "Committee on Assessment and Teacher Quality," chaired by David Z. Robinson of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. At least half the committee was drawn straight from the teacher-education-and-licensure establishment, and it apparently took the group no time at all to embrace the assumptions and prescriptions of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF, whose leader, Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, was a member) and its fellow traveling organizations, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC). Indeed, this report's key chapter on "defining teacher quality" is based entirely on those groups' ideology, as are most of the committee's recommendations. One can, nevertheless, learn a few useful things from these 300 pages, such as the fact that just 21 states test their new teachers

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Testing Teacher Candidates: The Role of Licensure Tests in Improving Teacher Quality