Teaching patriotism in a time of tragedy

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 21, 2001

WAY TO GO, MR. PRESIDENT! THAT WAS A HELLUVA SPEECH. WE'RE WITH YOU ALL THE WAY!

It's been more than a little upsetting to watch the education community respond to last Tuesday's terrible attack on the United States. The prize for greediest, most self-promoting and solipsistic response goes to an outfit called the Public Education Network. Within 24 hours of the tragedy, they issued a statement that, after a few pieties, proclaimed that "access to a high-quality public education is the bedrock of our democracy" and urged that "as important calls for rethinking our commitment to our national defense and the war terrorism are made, the Public Education Network asks policymakers and citizens to remember the important role that public education plays...." Translation: "We're so selfish that we think our stuff is more important than the security of a nation within which our stuff is possible." Maybe they'd like to spend a little time experiencing "public education" under the Taliban.

Far more widespread have been well-meaning efforts to help schools, teachers and parents respond appropriately to children during this traumatic time. Many educators are struggling with how best to do this, and all of us welcome well-formulated advice about how to deal with kids' fears and anxieties. When something awful happens, it's normal for a child to wonder whether it could happen to him-and to be fearful until the grownups in his life offer comfort and reassurance. So it's great

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Teaching patriotism in a time of tragedy

Privatization through the back door

Diane Ravitch / September 21, 2001

The New York City Board of Education has figured out how to privatize schools without seeming to. Last spring, parents at five troubled public schools voted down the Edison Project, and it appeared that nonpublic managers were not welcome in the school system. That turns out to be untrue. This fall, the system turned over a new school to Bard College, which is now operating Bard High School Early College.

This program gives Bard President Leon Botstein a chance to try out his ideas about what to do with the traditional four years of high school. Botstein has written several articles on the subject, and now the Board of Education has given him his own public school. The four-year program will allow its students to collect a two-year college degree when they graduate, to prove Botstein's belief that eleventh grade students are ready for college studies. Bard College will have considerable control of admissions, staffing, curriculum, and other key decisions.

The Bard program is one of many examples of quiet privatization; it joins the dozens of schools managed by New Visions for Public Education, the Center for Collaborative Education, the Consortium for Public Education, and other nonprofit organizations, which, like Bard have gained unusual control over school curriculum and staffing.

This manner of privatization seems to be far less controversial than the for-profit operation of Edison, or than the creation of charter schools, which continues to limp along at a

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Privatization through the back door

Raising the bar for college admission in New York

Diane Ravitch / September 21, 2001

The day before the disaster in New York City, The New York Times reported good news about City University of New York. This is a story that deserves to be told, not forgotten.

One of the most polarized debates in New York City in recent years occurred when the trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) decided two years ago to set minimum standards for entry for freshmen. The very idea that college students should be expected to read, write, and do mathematics unleashed paroxyms of rage: Students demonstrated, professors ranted, and The New York Times printed story after story about how equality of educational opportunity was endangered in the city's public university system.

Readers with a long memory or advanced years will recall that CUNY adopted "open admissions" under extreme pressure in 1969, in response to student demonstrations (actually, students chained themselves to college gates to demand the end of admissions standards and the city quickly capitulated). Every graduate of the New York City public schools was guaranteed admission, regardless of their ability to pass simple (10th grade level) tests of basic skills. With the arrival of large numbers of students who were not prepared for college work, the City College of New York (once known as the Harvard of the proletariat), Brooklyn College, and other senior colleges within the CUNY system, saw their graduation rates plummet and their faculty's energies increasingly devoted to remediation rather than

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Raising the bar for college admission in New York

Tax credits deserve a second look

September 21, 2001

The school choice movement is gaining in complexity as lawmakers increasingly opt for tax credits instead of vouchers as a way to help citizens, poor and otherwise, pay private school tuition for their children.

Six states-Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida-already have laws that give taxpayers a credit for some education expenditures when they pay their taxes, though not all cover private school tuition. These tax credit plans come in two basic flavors. In some states (Illinois, for instance), individual taxpayers receive a credit against their tax liabilities for at least some of the private school tuition they pay for their children. In other states (Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida), individuals or corporations can receive tax credits for donating to special funds that award private school tuition scholarships to low-income children.

Here's a quick look at how tax credits work in a few states:

1) Tax credits for tuition payments:

a) Minnesota was the first state to offer tax credits for education-related spending. The credit was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1983. Today families can get a credit of up to $2,500 a year for almost any education-related expense except private school tuition. (Private school tuition is, however, tax-deductible.)
b) In Illinois, nearly 134,000 families have taken advantage of the state's tuition tax credit, a break aimed at helping people send their children to private school by allowing families to subtract up to $500 from their tax bill for

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Tax credits deserve a second look

Creative answers to teacher shortages

September 21, 2001

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

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Creative answers to teacher shortages

Sex ed and its discontents

September 21, 2001

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

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Sex ed and its discontents

2000-2001 SAT Scores

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 21, 2001

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

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2000-2001 SAT Scores

The 2001 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

Kelly Scott / September 21, 2001

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

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The 2001 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?

The Arizona Scholarship Tax Credit: Giving Parents Choices, Saving Taxpayers Money

Kelly Scott / September 21, 2001

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

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The Arizona Scholarship Tax Credit: Giving Parents Choices, Saving Taxpayers Money