Education reform in Japan

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 21, 2002

I had the good fortune to take part last week in an international symposium hosted by Japan's National Institute for Educational Policy Research (NIER). The topic was "New Schools for the 21st Century." I was asked to talk about charter schools. Also present, besides several hundred Japanese educationists and policy types, were education analysts or officials from New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore.

Japan is in the throes of a major education reform effort called the Rainbow Plan. (See my earlier comment in the June 14, 2001 Gadfly) It was well explained to the Tokyo audience by education Vice Minister Ono Motoyuki and Ken Terawaki, who is deputy director-general of the Education Ministry and one of the principal architects of this set of changes, changes that commence next month, at the beginning of Japan's new school year.

Why is this happening? Mainly because the stagnation of Japan's economy has persuaded government and business leaders that they need to develop a different kind of human capital, people who are more creative, flexible and concerned about others.

The Rainbow Plan rests on seven pillars. Several make obvious sense, such as training teachers as "real professionals," creating "universities of international standard," dealing with disruptive students, and "making schools that can be trusted by parents and communities." (Under the latter heading comes "introducing new types of public schools, such as community schools," hence the interest in charters.)

There are also plans for a national assessment in core subjects

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Education reform in Japan

Why school boards?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 21, 2002

The state of Pennsylvania has recently taken control of Philadelphia's schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants control of New York's schools and the Maryland legislature will probably replace Prince George's County's dysfunctional elected school board with an appointed one. There's a big debate in Cleveland about whether mayoral control should continue. Other American communities are weighing the merits of elected versus appointed boards.

Citizens and journalists call to ask which model works better and what does the research show. The short answer seems to be that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and there's no solid evidence favoring either elected or appointed boards.

But that begs the truly interesting question, which is why do we need school boards at all? Why not entrust local education to the mayor (and to an education director or commissioner appointed by him/her) and state-level education to the governor (and his/her "secretary of education" or "commissioner")? Why complicate it with a separate board?

The classic answer is that local boards assure local control, express the community's priorities and assure that its values are honored and its needs met.

No doubt America still has some places where school boards do those things well. But there are way too many, particularly in big cities and poor communities, where this is a fraud or illusion. Far too many of today's school boards are dysfunctional creatures that micro-manage, promote patronage (and featherbedding), and deflect authority and

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Why school boards?

City offers bonuses to high-performing teachers in at-risk schools

March 21, 2002

Concerned about nine city schools on Tennessee's watch list for poor academic performance, Mayor Bob Corker of Chattanooga was determined to come up with a way to bring in a critical mass of high performing teachers to transform the culture of low expectations and low achievement in these schools-and keep them there. An advisory group appointed by the mayor, the Community Education Alliance, worked with two local foundations to develop a pay incentive program that will reward teachers and principals in those schools who raise academic achievement, as measured by the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System. Since the mayor does not run the school system, he took the innovative plan to the City Council, which quickly embraced it and voted unanimously to fund the program for three years. Teachers currently at the nine schools who have a record of high performance-teachers whose students have gained 115% of a grade level (i.e., 115% of a full year's progress) for each of the past three years-will receive an annual bonus of $5,000 for three years, as will teachers with a record of high performance at other schools who agree to teach in one of the nine schools. If any of the nine high-priority schools demonstrates a gain of 115% of a grade level schoolwide, the principal of that school will receive a $10,000 bonus and every teacher in that school will receive $1,000. If the gain is 120% of a grade level, every

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City offers bonuses to high-performing teachers in at-risk schools

Debating teacher certification and spinning support for vouchers in Ed Next

March 21, 2002

Should education schools lose their monopoly on teacher certification? Rick Hess, Mary Diez, and James Fraser debate the proposition in the Spring 2002 issue of Education Next (www.educationnext.org). Other articles in the same issue describe how alternative certification programs for teachers are sometimes just as burdensome as traditional ones, summarize the scant evidence in support of teacher certification, and analyze the effectiveness of Teach for America teachers. On another topic in the same issue, Stanford political scientist Terry Moe shows how the annual Phi Delta Kappa survey of attitudes toward education has "cooked the questions" on support for school vouchers in order to generate an anti-voucher result. Moe explains that the organization dropped a neutrally worded question about vouchers in 1991 and added a question that was worded in a way that was more apt to elicit a negative response. As online pundit Mickey Kaus noted on his website (www.kausfiles.com), a smart special interest group would have used a biased poll question from the start, avoiding the need for embarrassing alterations.

"Vouchers: Was a Poll Question 'Cooked'?" by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, The Washington Post, March 11, 2002

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Debating teacher certification and spinning support for vouchers in Ed Next

Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms: Effects of New American Schools in a High-Poverty District

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 21, 2002

Mark Berends, Joan Chun, Gina Schuyler, Sue Stockly and R. J. Briggs, RAND Corporation
2002

The RAND Corporation recently published this report by Mark Berends and four colleagues, examining in depth (160 pages) the experience of San Antonio, Texas with New American Schools (NAS). This is part of RAND's ongoing NAS research and evaluation project. The data are from 1997-9, during which time San Antonio schools implemented four of the NAS school designs. The RAND analysts sought to determine whether those designs actually altered what happened in classrooms (as opposed to affecting "school organization and governance"), whether they boosted student achievement, and what factors at the district, schools and classroom level bear on the effectiveness of the implementation and the changes that result. The bottom line: the NAS schools and classrooms weren't very different from others in San Antonio, nor were their students' scores very different. The main explanation, according to the authors, is not anything inherently flawed in the NAS designs but, rather, the fact that San Antonio (and Texas) was then in the throes of numerous concurrent (and conflicting) reforms within a high-stakes atmosphere. In other words, so much else was going on that it's impossible to isolate NAS effects. ("However, we did find significant effects of principal leadership on the TAAS reading and mathematics scores...in both NAS and non-NAS schools.") The authors go on to caution policymakers against trying too many different things at once. They note, in particular,

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Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms: Effects of New American Schools in a High-Poverty District

Contract for Failure: The Impact of Teacher Union Contracts on the Quality of California Schools

Terry Ryan / March 21, 2002

Should teacher unions be given a bigger say on academic issues? This is the question that the California Assembly is grappling with as they debate Assembly Bill 2160. The 300,000 member California Teachers Association and its allies are pushing hard for passage of the bill, while policymakers and administrators argue that the proposal is a power grab that, if passed, would block needed reforms. The Pacific Research Institute's (PRI) Center for School Reform jumped directly into the debate with the release of this report, which argues that California's public schools are near the bottom in student achievement despite record spending levels because unions perversely influence classroom instruction through the collective bargaining process. Although the report's evidence is skimpy in terms of showing a direct correlation between collective bargaining and deteriorating academic achievement, it does show that collective bargaining in California has resulted in education costing taxpayers far more than it would without unions and the bargaining process. For example, in an average California school district, 85 percent of the district's operating budget is tied to teacher and employee salaries. Such huge labor costs obviously constraint school system leaders from using resources to try innovative projects or technologies. Collective bargaining agreements-which reward experience over expertise-also make it harder to fire ineffective teachers and reward good ones. The report contends that teacher unions in California have been a major obstacle to urban school reform. It is for this reason that even those

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Contract for Failure: The Impact of Teacher Union Contracts on the Quality of California Schools

Dismantling Bilingual Education, Implementing English Immersion: The California Initiative

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 21, 2002

Christine H. Rossell, Public Policy Institute of California
February 20, 2002

Boston University political scientist Christine Rossell wrote this hundred-page (plus appendices) paper for the Public Policy Institute of California. It addresses the subject of bilingual education in California (and presumably beyond) more perceptively and informatively than anything I've previously read. The basic story is well known: California voters passed Proposition 227 in 1998, requiring that "English learners" be immersed in English rather than in traditional "bilingual" education classes. There's early evidence that this has boosted test scores for some youngsters. But the State Board of Education is fiddling with the rules and procedures in ways that seem calculated to mitigate the impact of Prop 227. Yet Rossell shows us that that's just the tip of the iceberg. Her paper dives way under the surface to present numerous surprising facts and arresting insights. For example, even at its peak, just 29% of California's "English learners" were enrolled in "bilingual" classes. Nor, according to Rossell (who has followed this subject for many years), is there any "unequivocal research demonstrating that bilingual education is the educational disaster that some of its critics claim." She also notes that, while rarely acknowledged, only Hispanic youngsters end up in "bilingual" classes. Speakers of other languages do not land in classes that instruct them in their native languages. "The import of the fact that bilingual education was not widespread and affected only Spanish speakers is that whatever replaces

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Dismantling Bilingual Education, Implementing English Immersion: The California Initiative

Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Companies 2001-2002

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 21, 2002

Alex Molnar, Glen Wilson, Melissa Restori and John Hutchison, Education Policy Studies Laboratory, Arizona State University
January 17, 2002

This is another report on the same subject: a directory of EMOs and the schools they operate. Published by Arizona State University's Education Policy Studies Laboratory, it profiles 36 companies that manage 368 schools. (CER reports on 19 companies and claims "about 350" schools. Much of the difference is due to CER focusing on national firms while the Arizona team includes a bunch of tiny one- and two-school companies, mainly in Arizona, where for-profit firms can hold charters directly.) The team leader and chief assembler is Alex Molnar, a longtime critic of the profit motive in K-12 education, but this lengthy document confines its critical comments to the opening pages. Thereafter it's "just the facts." It tells us considerably less than the CER report concerning the companies' characteristics but somewhat more about the individual schools that they operate. This one is free for the downloading (in both HTML and PDF formats) at http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/Archives/CERU%20Archives/ceru-rw.htm.

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Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Companies 2001-2002

Public-Private Partnerships: A Consumer's Guide

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 21, 2002

Carol Innerst, The Center for Education Reform
March 2002

The Center for Education Reform recently released this useful compilation of information on the "education industry," listing and describing many of the for-profit companies currently active in K-12 education, notably the "education management organizations" (EMOs) that run entire schools, along with a list of the schools that each is currently running. This field is constantly in flux, of course, with mergers, bankruptcies and start-ups every time you turn around. So no such compilation will have a long shelf life. This publication (compiled by veteran education journalist Carol Innerst) is meant to inform potential consumers of such services about the firms presently found in the marketplace. There's no attempt to judge or evaluate them. The consumer will find only information supplied by the companies themselves. Still, it's a helpful document for those browsing among firms and a valuable one for those tracking the evolution of this new "industry." The press release and executive summary are available at http://www.edreform.com/press/2002/partnership.htm, where you can also order a hard copy for $29.95 plus shipping. Alternatively, hard copies can be ordered by dialing 202-822-9000.

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Public-Private Partnerships: A Consumer's Guide