Reform prospects in Dayton

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 7, 2002

As readers may recall, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation keeps one eye focused on education reform issues at the national level and the other trained on K-12 education developments in Dayton, Ohio, where the Foundation had its origins and is engaged in a number of projects.

Dayton is more interesting than you might think for education reformers. It lacks the visibility of a New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia yet shares many of the same challenges. Three decades of forced busing and middle-class flight have taken their toll. Dayton's population is now 70 percent minority and disproportionately poor. The remaining families have watched their public schools deteriorate such that they met only three of the state's 27 standards in 2001. Fewer than one in four of the city's fourth graders met state reading benchmarks in 2000 and math scores are worse. Meanwhile, the enrollment hemorrhage continues: from 60,000 students in the 1960s to 21,000 today.

Though small, the public school system has been as dysfunctional as any in the land. While the current superintendent means well and has good ideas, she, like her predecessor, was hamstrung by an ineffectual, quarrelsome, and highly political school board, by a change-averse bureaucracy, by an acute lack of strong middle managers, and by a highly restrictive contract with a teachers union that seems allergic to every sort of serious reform.

Because the system's problems seemed so intractable, parents sought options outside the traditional public schools and,

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Reform prospects in Dayton

Sticking with standards-based reform in Massachusetts and across the country

March 7, 2002

While opponents of standardized testing continue to attract attention in the media, a national survey released by Public Agenda this week found that support for turning back the clock on the standards movement is virtually nonexistent among parents (2 percent), teachers (1 percent), employers (2 percent), and college professors (1 percent), with very large majorities among each group also viewing standardized tests as a motivational tool that prompts students to work harder. 95 percent of students in the survey said that they either can deal with the stress of standardized tests or don't worry at all about taking them. Most students and teachers said that preparing for the tests has not detracted from learning in their classrooms. While employers and college professors are giving public schools more credit for raising academic standards, they continue to complain that students emerging from those schools have weak writing, grammar, and basic math skills. Roughly 75 percent of employers and college professors say that the high school graduates they encounter have just fair or poor skills in grammar, spelling, and the ability to write clearly, and two thirds of both groups say the same about high school graduates' skills in basic math.

In Massachusetts, despite reports of anti-testing "backlash," support for standards-based reform appears to be growing. Bay State education officials announced last week that almost half of the 12,000 high school juniors who failed the state's challenging exit exam in English in 2001 passed

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Sticking with standards-based reform in Massachusetts and across the country

Scientifically based research on education has its moment in the sun

March 7, 2002

The new federal education law, the No Child Left Behind Act, demands in many places that programs funded by federal dollars be supported by "scientifically based research," but among practitioners, and even some researchers, there is great uncertainty about what this means. To clarify what scientifically based research is and to explain why it is so crucial, the U.S. Department of Education hosted a seminar on the topic in February 2002. The transcript of that seminar, as well as papers by the presenters, are now available on the department's web site. In the opening presentation, Valerie Reyna of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement describes the alternatives to scientific research and lays out the logic behind randomized field trials-which she describes as the best kind of evidence-and other kinds of research (including quasi-experimental or correlational studies) in plain language. In another presentation, Steve Raudenbush of the University of Michigan describes how the medical profession was gradually converted to the view of basing its practice on scientific research, explores when random assignment studies are desirable and when they are not, and explains how we can judge the scientific quality of studies that do not use random assignment, with the key factor being whether investigators have effectively evaluated competing explanations for what is found. A transcript of and papers from the seminar on scientifically based research hosted by the U.S. Department of Education can be found at http://www/ed.gov/nclb/research.

An article in

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Scientifically based research on education has its moment in the sun

Teaching democracy in Afghanistan

March 7, 2002

Recent events make painfully clear that we cannot take the spread of democracy for granted, writes American Federation of Teachers president Sandy Feldman in her monthly "Where We Stand" column. Devotion to human dignity and freedom, to equal rights, and to the rule of law must be taught and learned and practiced. As the Afghani government and international agencies turn to the task of rebuilding that country's education system, she urges the United States to support efforts to bring democratic ideas and subjects like science, math, and economics to that nation's schools, including programs that disseminate worthy books and curricula. See "Teaching Democracy," at http://www.aft.org/stand/index.html. Chester Finn made a similar argument in a recent Gadfly editorial, "What to do about education in the Islamic world?" in the February 20, 2002 issue.

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Teaching democracy in Afghanistan

Bilingual Education: An Annual Report

March 7, 2002

Don Soifer, Lexington Institute
January 2002

This slim report summarizes the bilingual education reforms contained in the No Child Left Behind Act and describes what some states are doing in the area of bilingual education. Under the new law, states choose their own approaches to helping limited English proficient students, but are held accountable for results; if students do not improve their English fluency, funds can be taken away, teachers replaced, or curricula overhauled. The law also requires that parents be informed why and for how long their children are being placed in bilingual education programs. They can also demand that their children be removed from such programs. For a copy of the report, fax (703-522-5837) or e-mail (mail@lexingtoninstitute.org) a request to the Lexington Institute.

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Bilingual Education: An Annual Report

Competition and Quality in Deregulated Industries: Lessons for the Education Debate

Terry Ryan / March 7, 2002

Jerry Ellig and Kenneth Kelly, Texas Review of Law & Politics
Spring 2002

What would happen if education were deregulated? It is this question that the authors of "Competition and Quality in Deregulated Industries" seek to answer when they ask whether opening up public education (a state monopoly) to competition will increase or decrease quality. To put that question in context, the authors, economists working with the Federal Trade Commission, review what has happened to other "critical public services" that were de-regulated in the past two decades-surface freight transportation, long-distance telecommunications, and airlines. In reviewing the evidence, they show that competition tends to lower prices and improve services for virtually all customers, including those who choose to remain with the former monopoly; competition thus improves both the traditional monopoly service provider as well as the new entrants. The authors reviewed studies of voucher and private scholarship programs to see whether the introduction of competition to public schools has had a similar same effect. In examining the Milwaukee voucher program, they discovered that those public schools that faced competition saw student test scores rise twice as much as those facing no outside competition. In assessing the impact of privately funded voucher programs in Washington, DC, New York City and Dayton, OH, the authors noted dramatic gains in the academic achievement of African-American students. In short, they contend, early indications show that competition in education has the same effect it has had on other

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Competition and Quality in Deregulated Industries: Lessons for the Education Debate

Preschool for All: Investing in a Productive and Just Society

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 7, 2002

Committee on Economic Development
2002

This report from the Committee on Economic Development could have been written decades ago by almost any advocacy group. With one exception, it reads like a run of the mill plea for federal and state governments to spend many billions to provide universal access to preschool for every American child from age 3. It focuses on access, money and government. It understates the failings of many existing preschool and day care programs already serving millions of American youngsters: their neglect of (and sometimes hostility toward) an organized, effective, school-readiness curriculum. It overstates the role of the federal government as funder, standard-setter and regulator. Its main virtue-that one exception-is that it wants these expanded pre-kindergarten programs to be delivered by a variety of public and private organizations and wants parents to be able to choose among them. It is, in that sense, a plea for universal pre-school vouchers for American families. It would probably be more compelling if the authors had paid any attention to budgetary realities and perhaps limited themselves to low-income children. It would surely be more compelling if it addressed the central flaw in much of what passes for pre-school today (including the beloved Headstart program): its failure to prepare children (especially poor children) for academic success when they reach school, a failure attributable in large measure to the widely held view among program operators and staff that their job is to nurture their wee

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Preschool for All: Investing in a Productive and Just Society

Sizing Things Up

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 7, 2002

Public Agenda
2002

How much does (high) school size matter to American students, teachers and parents? With support from the Gates Foundation, Public Agenda set out to investigate. They surveyed teachers and students in both small and large high schools, as well as 800 parents of high school students. Gates's Tom Vander Ark says the findings "demonstrate the value of small schools." And there is no gainsaying that parents of children in small high schools are more pleased with those schools than are parents of kids in big schools. Among the kids, however, the differences are slight. Public Agenda found far more similarities of view than differences as between those enrolled in small and large high schools. The main differences are predictable: more crowded corridors in big schools, more homogeneous students in small ones. That's about it. As for teachers, differences emerge on a few issues (overcrowding, students "falling through the cracks"), but on many dimensions (e.g. school spirit, teacher morale, parent involvement) the differences are minor or nonexistent. The most significant parts of this valuable study, in my view, have very little to do with school size. Rather, they again show the generally dismal state of the American high school, a place of much violence, low morale, and mediocre academic performance. Small schools haven't licked those problems nor insulated their pupils from them. Says Public Agenda: "Many students in small high schools nationwide still inhabit a rough-edged world, replete with the

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Sizing Things Up