A new year for education?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 10, 2002

Now that George W. Bush has signed the "No Child Left Behind" act, the flashbulbs have just about stopped popping, and the policy (and media) focus shifts back to terrorism and the economy, the education world will turn to the low profile but crucial matter of translating this thousand-page bill's dozens of programs and hundreds of provisions into schoolhouse practice. That sounds like a bureaucratic yawner but in truth it matters quite a lot. To avoid deadlock, Senate-House conferees punted some sticky issues to the Education Department to resolve: determining what constitutes acceptable state tests, by what criteria to approve a state's school accountability plan, what are "qualified" teachers, and how broadly to interpret a clause that lets schools avoid sanctions if their various pupil populations are making lesser gains than are required under the "adequate yearly progress" provision at the heart of the bill. With such sizable matters come reams of lesser issues whose handling will determine how much traction this legislation actually gains in millions of separate classrooms.

History offers no grounds for optimism that this will be done quickly or well. Congress habitually builds such long timelines into these measures that the most important changes need not even be made until someone else's term in office. (States have five years, for example, to comply with the new testing requirement.) The last time around, Bill Clinton's Education Department dawdled so long in implementing the 1994 education amendments that today

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A new year for education?

Two gripes to start the new year

Diane Ravitch / January 10, 2002

Gripe number one:

When Congress decided to federalize the nation's airport security personnel, there was a briefly heated debate about whether "federalizing" was synonymous with improving, or whether it would mean nothing more than adding 28,000 people to the federal workforce with additional job protections for the workers but no additional security for passengers. During the debate, we were assured by our elected representatives that those who worked in sensitive positions in the airports would have to meet higher standards than are currently in place.

Surprise: the nation's airport security personnel will be, apparently, exactly the same as those who were on the job (or not on the job) on September 11. To make matters worse, the Department of Transportation is rapidly dropping or diluting or forgetting about the "standards" that the public thought had been adopted in the legislation. After an outcry from places like California, it turns out that security personnel will NOT have to be American citizens. It seems that a large number of these workers are not American citizens, even though they have lived in the United States (in some cases) for years (certainly enough years to apply for and receive their citizenship papers).

Worse yet: those people who are our nation's first line of defense, screening air passengers and their possessions, will not need to be high school graduates. At a time when nearly 90% of all young people are getting high school diplomas, this move is outrageous.

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Two gripes to start the new year

ESEA, IDEA: It's all about phonics

January 10, 2002

While the debate over special education tends to focus on its cost - and how much money it takes away from regular education - Congress will get nowhere on this topic until lawmakers begin to view special and regular education as part of a single system, one that is hampered by an all too pervasive problem: that schools are teaching reading in a way that fails to effectively reach millions of children. So argues Brent Staples in a column in the January 5 New York Times. Half of children who are placed in special ed are there for reading difficulties, he writes. Studies from NIH show that 95 percent of learning impaired children can become effective readers if taught by scientifically proven methods, but less than a quarter of American teachers know how to teach reading to children who do not get it automatically.

The education bill that was signed into law this week attempts to do something about this problem. The Bush administration has pledged at least $900 million a year over six years to the effort to teach reading using "scientifically based" approaches, and an additional $75 million for pre-kindergarten reading initiatives. The administration is sending 328,000 booklets summarizing the findings of the National Reading Panel, which highlighted the importance of phonics instruction, to educators across the country, and later this year the Department of Education will send education officials around the country a guide that analyzes the

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ESEA, IDEA: It's all about phonics

Not a ParodyWhy education research struggles for respect

January 10, 2002

Members of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) who attend the organization's annual meeting in 2002 are invited to attend a professional development course (for only $70!) that will train them to engage "with poetic representation of data as a way of focusing, interpreting, clarifying, and communicating the results of qualitative research," according to a note in the December 2001 issue of Educational Researcher, the association's journal. The complete description, which appears on pp. 38-39, is as follows:

 "Constructing Data Poems

This workshop engages participants with poetic representation of data as a way of focusing, interpreting, clarifying, and communicating the results of qualitative research.  It further addresses the question of poetic representation as an avenue for culturally relevant research.  Its purpose is to give participants a hands-on experience with poetic representation of data and an exposure to a range of forms and purposes.  Participants may work with data that they will be guided to generate during the workshop or
with data they bring.  Presenters will offer models of data poems; specific strategies for constructing and revising data poems; examples of poet-researcher collaborations; trans-national/trans-cultural collaborations, and ways of thinking about assessment.  In this highly interactive session, issues for discussion will include a) the potential for poetic representation of research and the limitations of that potential, b)the potential roles of data poems in teaching and learning, and c) the potential of poetic representation for culturally relevant research."

This workshop is promoted in the same journal that

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Not a ParodyWhy education research struggles for respect

Data everywhere, but useful analysis is in short supply

January 10, 2002

Scientific American reports that data on the effects of class size reduction are inconclusive. According to Education Week, the same is true of data on the "whole school" reform effort. While education data exist in oversupply, they are of little use for policymaking, writes E.D. Hirsch in a column for the Hoover Institution. What turns data into usable information is interpretation, which teases out the separate factors that affect outcomes and assigns relative causality to them. The best recent attempt to interpret education data and draw policy conclusions from it was offered by the late Jeanne Chall in The Academic Achievement Challenge, the fruit of a lifetime of engagement with education research, Hirsch writes, but this book has had a negligible effect on policies and schools because it has not been widely disseminated. To the bookstore... "Education Policy and Information," by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Hoover Institution weekly essay, January 7, 2002

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Data everywhere, but useful analysis is in short supply

How not to secure a qualified teacher for every classroom

January 10, 2002

While the testing and reading provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act have been monopolizing the spotlight, the requirement that all teachers in core academic subjects be fully qualified within four years is starting to attract its share of unfriendly attention. In an article in last week's Sacramento Bee, Wayne Johnson, the president of the California Teachers Association called it "fantasy legislation" and said, "It's not going to happen." But Rep. George Miller (D-California), one of the key backers of the legislation, is dead serious about the goal. "How long do they suggest we should have unqualified teachers in the classroom?" he asked. "How long would they accept unqualified firemen, policemen, doctors? The answer is, they wouldn't. People are running around yelling 'We can't do this, we can't do this.' Well, you haven't even tried yet. ... Not only is this an attainable goal, but it is absolutely essential if you're going to improve the quality of education in the poorer-performing schools. For too long, states and school districts have looked the other way as they've hired people who are unqualified." Perhaps what makes the goal of a qualified teacher in every classroom seem impossible to some people is their unwillingness to imagine changing any of the ground rules and procedures that today determine who can teach and who cannot, rules and procedures that discourage and demoralize many talented teachers and prospective teachers. Redefining what is meant by qualified

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How not to secure a qualified teacher for every classroom

Quality Counts 2002: Building Blocks for Success

Terry Ryan / January 10, 2002

Education Week, January 10, 2002

Few in the world of education would argue with the notion that many skills and attitudes required for a life of successful learning have their roots in the nursery, yet providing an appropriate environment for early years' learning for all children is no easy matter. The sixth annual Quality Counts report, published by Education Week this week, examines what all 50 states and the District of Columbia are doing in their efforts to provide quality early-learning experiences for children under the age of five. During a typical week, 11.9 million children younger than 5 in the United States spend part of their waking hours in the care of someone other than their parents. The report notes that 39 states and the District of Columbia provide state-financed pre-kindergarten for at least some of their 3-to 5-year olds, up from about 10 in 1980. Annual state spending for such programs now exceeds $1.9 billion. Despite this increased spending, however, there is a huge discrepancy across states, and even within communities, in the quality of learning experiences afforded young children. One of the primary reasons for this variation is that less than a third of the states have specified what under-fives should know or be able to do. Also working against the goal of high-quality early learning experiences for all children is the abysmal pay of preschool teachers, who had an average annual salary of $19,610 in 1999, less

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Quality Counts 2002: Building Blocks for Success

Teacher Characteristics and Student Achievement Gains: A Review

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 10, 2002

Andrew J. Wayne and Peter Youngs, Review of Educational Research 
Spring 2003, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 89-122

This short but important paper reviews the existing research on teacher characteristics to determine what we know about which teachers are most effective. One finding, unfortunately, consistent with the recent ECS report [for Gadfly's review of the ECS report, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=110#1383], is that there isn't a lot of reliable research on this topic. Among the relatively few studies that meet the authors' criteria--primarily, the use of value added analysis and proper controls--they do find some worthwhile insights. Correlates of teacher effectiveness include the quality of the teacher's undergraduate school and the teacher's performance on standardized tests (such as verbal skills or teacher licensure tests). Perhaps more interesting is their examination of degrees, coursework, and certification. With respect to the first two, only in mathematics has a reliable connection been found: Teachers with master's degrees in math do make better math teachers. (In other subjects, the connection has not been demonstrated.) With respect to certification, the lesson is that it's beneficial "only when teachers have certification for the subject taught." Notably absent from existing research is any solid evidence that race, years of experience, or holding an education degree do anybody any good. The implications seem clear: certification processes and hiring decisions need to incorporate what teachers know, and still more research is needed about which teacher characteristics actually help students learn. This paper provides a useful review

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Teacher Characteristics and Student Achievement Gains: A Review

Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 10, 2002

Richard M. Ingersoll, American Educational Research Journal, Fall 2001

In this review published in the American Educational Research Journal, Penn education sociologist Richard M. Ingersoll pokes imaginatively into the question of whether high teacher turnover rates arise from immutable demographic shifts, fundamental supply shortages, individual teacher characteristics, or organizational characteristics of the schools themselves. Mind you, he went in search of the latter. And he found some interesting evidence that various school characteristics cause lots of teachers to leave (about 15% per year of late). He concludes that "School staffing problems are primarily due to excess demand resulting from a 'revolving door' - where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement." He thus partakes of the field's common assumption that teaching ought to be a lifetime career, not something that one simply does for a while before or after doing something else. But if you share his assumption, you must be alarmed by his conclusion that no supply-enhancing efforts in K-12 teaching can possibly succeed until and unless steps are taken to curb the "excess demand" that he identified. (Incidentally, the highest turnover rates he found are not in public schools at all but in small private schools.) What is going on? Ingersoll says that "Retirement accounts for a relatively small number of departures, a moderate number of departures are reported due to school staffing actions, a larger proportion of teachers indicate they depart for

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Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis

The Heart of a High School: One Community's Effort to Transform Urban Education

Kelly Scott / January 10, 2002

Holly Holland and Kelly Mazzoli, 2001

This 306-page book offers an insider's account of an urban school reform initiative in an unnamed, mid-sized Midwestern city.  Authors Holly Holland and Kelly Mazzoli describe how one of the largest private donations ever made to a single high school is giving a troubled urban school a new lease on life.  To help students overcome such obstacles as high poverty, low expectations, inadequate teacher training, bureaucracy, and astonishing parental neglect, school officials created a comprehensive freshman academy where faculty members pledged to become so involved in kids' lives - through targeted and aggressive academic and emotional support - that no one would fall through the cracks.  End-of-year surveys suggest that the academy is having an impact; school leaders have set many - but not all - failing students on a more promising path to higher academic achievement, better manners, and more constructive personal habits.  To order a copy of the book, contact the publisher at Heinemann, 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881; phone 800-225-5800; fax 203-750-9790.  Holland and Mazzoli published an article describing the reform initiative in the December 2001 issue of Phi Delta Kappan (not yet available online).

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The Heart of a High School: One Community's Effort to Transform Urban Education