Federal education research and national assessment

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 14, 2002

Yesterday, a House education subcommittee "marked up" H.R. 3801, which was recently introduced by subcommittee chairman Michael Castle (R-Delaware), committee chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio) and several other GOP congressmen. The full committee is slated to tackle it next week.

The official synopsis terms it "a bill to provide for improvement of Federal education research, statistics, evaluation, information, and dissemination...." But don't yawn too fast. What H.R. 3801 actually does is radically restructure the federal government's arrangements for education R & D, statistics, program evaluation and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For the most part, it seems likely to improve the current set-up. But it introduces a couple of risks. And the current version would do serious harm to NAEP.

The present Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) would vanish. From its ashes would arise a new entity called the Academy of Education Sciences, presided over by a director to be nominated by the President (and confirmed by the Senate) for a six-year term. (Incumbent OERI assistant secretary Russ Whitehurst is grandfathered into that post until July 1, 2007.) The new Academy will have its own policy-setting National Board for Education Sciences, also presidential appointees, fifteen in number (plus ex officios), dominated by "highly qualified experts." Though nominally inside the Education Department, the Academy director would enjoy complete autonomy over the programs and activities in his purview. ("The Secretary shall delegate to the Director all functions for carrying out this

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Federal education research and national assessment

Boot camp for nontraditional superintendents has its first recruits

March 14, 2002

Philanthropist Eli Broad has engaged Michigan Governor John Engler and Detroit Public Schools CEO Kenneth Burnley in an effort to recruit and train dynamic leaders from business, the military, and other backgrounds to run urban school districts. Three dozen executives and educators are enrolled in the Broad Center for Superintendents' first class of aspiring school system executives. There they will receive training in leadership, student learning and teaching strategies, education decision-making, local politics, public relations, marketing and school competition, according to an article in The Detroit News. While some in the education establishment voice doubt about recruiting school leaders from business ranks, the Broad Center's managing director says that underperforming school districts need to move beyond "the protectors of the past" and hire superintendents "with the stamina and capacity to lead." For details see "Leaders tout state's method for nation's public schools," by John Bebow, The Detroit News, March 7, 2002.

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Boot camp for nontraditional superintendents has its first recruits

Department of Education seeks to be held accountable

March 14, 2002

Secretary Rod Paige has just released a five-year strategic plan for the U.S. Department of Education that seeks to bring real accountability to the Department's own functions. Combining elements of the No Child Left Behind Act with the President's management agenda, the plan sets six strategic goals for the agency, each with specific objectives and performance measures. The goals are to: 1) create a culture of achievement, 2) improve student achievement, 3) develop safe schools and strong character, 4) transform education into an evidence-based field, 5) enhance the quality of and access to postsecondary and adult education, and 6) establish management excellence. The Department intends to report to Congress annually on actions linked to the goals and to appraise employees based on performance linked to the goals. To view the plan, surf to www.ed.gov/pubs/stratplan2002-07/index.html.

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Department of Education seeks to be held accountable

Opponents of evolution challenge science standards in Ohio

March 14, 2002

Before a packed house earlier this week, the Ohio board of education hosted a two-hour panel discussion on the teaching of evolution and how it should be handled within the state's new science standards. Representatives of the "intelligent design" movement, who believe that life is so complex that some sort of intelligent designer must be involved, and thus that that natural selection is not the sole force behind evolution, argued that their views should be included in classroom discussions of evolution. In response, scientists from two major universities argued that the theory of evolution has grown in strength through decades of repeated experimentation and discovery, while intelligent design theory has not been tested. There is no real controversy among scientists over evolution, they argued, and science's practice of endlessly testing evidence means that not all ideas deserve equal treatment in the classroom. The debate was prompted by a new set of science standards to be voted on by the state school board this year, standards that are opposed by creationists of various stripes. Ohio's old science standards received a grade of F from Professor Lawrence Lerner, who evaluated the treatment of evolution in the science standards of all 50 states in a September 2000 report for the Fordham Foundation. Unlike the old standards, which skirted any mention of evolution, Ohio's new (draft) science standards treat this topic in exemplary fashion. Lerner says they would earn a grade of A.

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Opponents of evolution challenge science standards in Ohio

Fifty Major Thinkers on Education: From Confucius to Dewey

Terry Ryan / March 14, 2002

Edited by Joy A. Palmer
2001

"I'll tell you that one of my favorite fancies is to look at my family as a small world, to watch the progress of my little men, and, lately, to see how well the influence of my little women works upon them." The novelist and educator Louisa May Alcott shared this particular insight into the workings of human nature, but it is representative of the sort of things we all know but can't articulate as well as a writer like Alcott. Fifty Major Thinkers on Education is the first of two volumes of essays describing the impact of some of history's more profound thinkers on education and human nature. It's nicely varied. For those who advocate a rigorous academic education, there's the German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart who postulated a theory of education in the early 19th century that should be, "profound, precise and complete,' and the teaching of which must demand 'high standards' and 'rigorous thinking." For child-centered progressives, there is Herbert Spencer arguing that "Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible." Those who favor service learning as a way to merge academics with life will recognize the voice of John Dewey. Today, as public officials and educators across the country talk about the opportunities afforded in the first five years

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Fifty Major Thinkers on Education: From Confucius to Dewey

Investigating the Influence of Standards: A Framework for Research in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 14, 2002

Edited by Iris Weiss, Michael Knapp, Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill, National Research Council
2001

Here we have yet another National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report on education, this one paid for by the National Science Foundation and edited by two academics who served on the committee that did the study (Iris Weiss and Michael Knapp) and two National Academy staffers (Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill). It starts with the so-called "national standards" in math, science and technology, all of them developed and issued by self-governing and sometimes self-interested private groups (the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Research Council itself, and a less familiar outfit called the International Technology Education Association.) The basic question addressed here is how to determine what difference those standards have made in the U.S. education system and what effects they've had on student learning. Yet that question stays unanswered. This volume simply builds an elaborate "framework" within which others can seek to answer it and by which people can interpret studies claiming to answer it. This makes for an unsatisfying document, more a guide to "how to look at this question" than an actual look. Meager as it is, there's still a problem with this approach, which resembles members of a track team devising the criteria by which their own performance will be judged in the high jump and relay race. There's much overlap between the developers of the standards being discussed and

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Investigating the Influence of Standards: A Framework for Research in Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education

Out-of-Field Teaching, Educational Inequality, and the Organization of Schools: An Exploratory Analysis

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 14, 2002

Richard M. Ingersoll, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington
January 2002

The University of Washington's Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy published this 33-page research report by Richard M. Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania. Ingersoll has long been one of the most dogged and perceptive analysts of "out-of-field" teaching in the United States. Here he breaks some new ground, albeit in preliminary fashion. Using the federal government's Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), he looks not at issues of teacher training, certification or supply/demand but at other reasons why teachers end up responsible for courses in subjects different from those they trained for. It turns out that, especially for disadvantaged youngsters, much out-of-field teaching is explained by "aspects of the administration and organization of schools." Most striking: "[T]he way school administrators-especially school principals-respond to and cope with staffing decisions and challenges affects the levels of out-of-field teaching more than does the extent to which schools face teacher shortages and attendant hiring difficulties." It seems that schools and school systems differ considerably in how their administrators respond to difficulties in filling specific jobs. Ingersoll reports, for example, that only two-thirds of U.S. school districts "require that new teacher hires hold a college major or minor in the field to be taught." The implications are large: out-of-field teaching is not entirely (or even primarily) a product of demographic forces, large manpower shifts or the ups and downs

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Out-of-Field Teaching, Educational Inequality, and the Organization of Schools: An Exploratory Analysis

The Learning Return on Our Educational Technology Investment: A Review of Findings from Research

Terry Ryan / March 14, 2002

Loretta Kelley and Cathy Ringstaff, WestEd
2002

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, businesses across the United States invested heavily in information communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers and networking systems but received few benefits in terms of increased productivity. It seemed a lot of workers simply used the new technologies to do pretty much what they had always done or, worse, used it to play games and randomly surf. Thus, their productivity remained flat. This combination of increased investment in ICTs and stagnant productivity even got a name-the Solow Paradox. By the mid-1990s, however, workers, often the younger ones within a firm, began using this technology to change the way they did their jobs. As a result, the U.S. economy boomed during the second half of the decade. The lesson for schools: it is not enough to invest in technology alone. To produce benefits, it must be allowed to change the way the organization and its employees operate. This is the conclusion of "The Learning Return on Our Education Technology Investment," a report by WestEd's Regional Technology in Education Consortium that reviews major research findings related to technology use in education. The authors do not claim to have discovered a scientific basis for the effective use of technology in education but argue that they have identified factors associated with effectiveness that repeatedly appear in the largest research studies of technology in education. To wit: 1) technology is best used as

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The Learning Return on Our Educational Technology Investment: A Review of Findings from Research

The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 14, 2002

Andrew Sum, Irwin Kirsch and Robert Taggart, Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service
February 2002

This interesting and disturbing 42-page analysis of adult literacy in the United States was published last month by Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center. The authors took two important multi-national studies of adult literacy that were conducted during the 1990's and reanalyzed their data, both to see how the U.S. fared overall and, more interestingly, how various sub-populations did. The results are generally sobering, and written in unusually strong language: "The U.S. spends more per capital on education than nearly all other high-income countries... [yet] our average proficiency scores at best only match the world average....Our educational system is clearly less productive in raising the literacy skills of students per dollar spent....[T]his inefficiency is a major drain on our economy. Further, our renewed national commitment to educational improvements over the past decade has thus far yielded only minor gains....[T]he U.S. appears to be living off its past higher educational investments and will inevitably lose ground in the coming decade." We learn that older adults are more literate than younger adults; that white adults are notably more literate than minorities; and that native-born Americans are significantly more literate than immigrants. The upshot, say the authors, is that big trouble lies ahead in terms of America's economic competitiveness as well as various gauges of domestic equality. Thus the report's provocative title. (The authors also offer policy recommendations, though these

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The Twin Challenges of Mediocrity and Inequality: Literacy in the U.S. from an International Perspective

When schools compete, how do they compete? An assessment of Chile's nationwide school voucher program

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 14, 2002

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Miguel Urquiola, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
January 2002

Here is another (#43) in the growing series of "occasional papers" from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Written by Chang-Tai Hsieh of Princeton and Miguel Urquiola of Cornell, this one analyzes what the authors call Chile's "school voucher program" dating back to 1981. They contend that Chile's experience lends itself to the analysis of the effects of vouchers because the country's policy has remained fairly stable, the number of children who shifted from public to private schools (at least in urban areas) was sizable, and there are good data regarding student achievement. The authors conclude that vouchers in Chile produced no overall improvement in that country's overall educational achievement due to what they call "sorting": the reallocation of stronger and relatively wealthier students from public to private schools. The technical analysis in this paper is intricate and worthy of close inspection by more sophisticated methodologists than I. It would also be valuable to obtain some Chilean perspectives on what happened there and how best to analyze it. It seems fairly clear, though, that the data from Chile warrant attention by school choice researchers, even as one wonders how much the cultural, sociological and political singularities of a country shape its individual and institutional behaviors in ways that would not translate to another

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When schools compete, how do they compete? An assessment of Chile's nationwide school voucher program