The myth of the special ed burden

Jay P. Greene / May 9, 2002

The debate swirling around renewal of the major federal law addressing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), draws much of its energy from a widely shared but probably false premise: that schools are increasingly swamped with disabled children who are diverting scarce resources away from other students. Both the education establishment and IDEA reformers tend to accept this premise although they draw different conclusions from it. The establishment wants the federal government to cover the costs of special education more fully so that, as they see it, public schools will finally have the wherewithal to deliver on the promise of improving the achievement of non-disabled students. Cost-conscious reformers, on the other hand, want the costs of special education contained, figuring that money devoted to general education is likely to yield better results than money devoted to special education.

But what makes everyone think the schools are being inundated by more and more children with learning problems? It's true that the proportion of children in special education has increased significantly since the mid-1970s, when IDEA began. The percentage of K-12 students identified as needing special education rose from 8.3% in 1976-7 to 11.8% in 1998-9. But an increase in the percentage of students identified as needing special education does not necessarily mean that there has been an increase in the percentage of students with disabilities, any more than an increase in reports of domestic violence necessarily means there is

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The myth of the special ed burden

Do we really need school boards?

May 9, 2002

Why have school boards at all? asked Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt in a provocative op-ed this week. We don't elect our city police chief or our county health commissioner, yet nobody sees this as a denial of democracy. Why not let our elected mayors and city or county councils-the people who make the budgets-take similar responsibility for public schools? Hiatt quotes Michael Usdan, who argues that today's separation of school boards from the rest of local government impedes the cooperation needed to deal with complex, diverse populations in cities and inner suburbs. After recounting the antics of some dysfunctional school boards, Hiatt describes efforts of mayors, governors, and legislatures to take control of troubled school systems in some urban areas, but reminds us that the challenges facing these schools are enormous and will not be solved merely by reshuffling the folks at the top. He remains hopeful, however, that boards appointed by political leaders "can deliver something that was beyond the capacity of the elected panels they're replacing: a qualified superintendent who sticks around for a while and a school board that lets the superintendent do his or her job. Such stability isn't sufficient to guarantee progress, but it certainly is a prerequisite." See "What's so sacred about a school board?" by Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post, May 6, 2002.

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Do we really need school boards?

High school seniors still know little U.S. history

May 9, 2002

The U.S. Department of Education released the results of the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in history today, and while the scores of fourth and eighth graders have modestly improved since 1994, the scores of twelfth graders were frustratingly low and showed no improvement. In twelfth grade, 57 percent of students still fall "below basic." In no other subject assessed by NAEP do more than half of high school seniors register below basic, noted historian Diane Ravitch, who spoke at a news conference organized by the Department. "Such poor results in U.S. history are cause for additional alarm at a time when the United States is under terrorist threat," she remarked. "Our ability to defend-intelligently and thoughtfully-what we as a nation hold dear depends on our knowledge and understanding of what we hold dear. That can only be achieved through learning the history we share, and clearly far too many high school seniors have not learned even a modest part of it." For more about the NAEP results, go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard.

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High school seniors still know little U.S. history

NBPTS-certified teachers flunk value-added test in Tennessee

May 9, 2002

Teachers who are certified as outstanding by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) are awarded large salary increases in many states and districts, but some researchers have questioned whether the NBPTS is accurately identifying the most effective teachers with its complex and expensive procedures. New research suggests that NBPTS-certified teachers are not making exceptional contributions to student learning in Tennessee, where the accountability system uses sophisticated methods to calculate the annual achievement gains of the students of every teacher in grades 3 through 8. In "The Value-Added Achievement Gains of NBPTS-Certified Teachers in Tennessee," J.E. Stone of the College of Education at East Tennessee State University examines the annual student achievement gains produced by the 16 NBPTS-certified teachers who teach in grades 3 through 8 in Tennessee, and who therefore have value-added score reports in the state's database. He finds that only 18 percent of the NBPTS-certified teachers' value-added scores reach the level of exemplary, which the state defines as bringing about an improvement in student achievement equal to 115 percent of one typical year's academic growth in the local school system. On the other hand, 13 percent of the NBPTS-certified teachers' scores would be considered deficient, which the state defines as bringing about a gain of less than 85 percent of a year's growth. None of the 16 teachers meets the standard for high-performing teaching established by a new bonus pay program in Chattanooga, which requires teachers

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NBPTS-certified teachers flunk value-added test in Tennessee

"Lost at Sea": New Teachers' Experiences with Curriculum and Assessment

Kelly Scott / May 9, 2002

David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson, Susan M. Kardos, Edward Liu and Heather G. Peske, Teachers College Record
2002

In an intriguing article in the December 2001 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Harvard ed school professor Susan Moore Johnson and four colleagues explored the so-called "generation gap" between new teachers and those who have spent their professional lives in classrooms. Analyzing the results of interviews with 50 first- and second-year teachers in Massachusetts, the researchers found that newer teachers hold dramatically different views of their profession and expectations for their own careers than do classroom veterans. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=79#1220.) Now Johnson and team have culled another set of observations from those interviews. New teachers, they find, feel "lost at sea" when it comes to their experiences with curricula, state standards and high-stakes testing. Even in states with well developed systems of standards and accountability, fledgling teachers-whose hands are full with such tasks as learning to maintain discipline and navigate school bureaucracy-report that they were not given detailed curricula to help them determine what to teach, how, and when. Rather, testing objectives serve as "proxies" for substantive curricula in many schools and districts. The result is that many new teachers scramble to cobble together lesson plans from one day to the next without coherence or clear understanding of which topics are intellectually most important. Moore and colleagues say their research has several implications. At the state level, policymakers must insist that schools and districts

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"Lost at Sea": New Teachers' Experiences with Curriculum and Assessment

Enhancing Urban Children's Early Success in School

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 9, 2002

Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg, American Educational Research Association
April 2002

In this 33-page paper prepared for last month's American Educational Research Association meeting, Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg of the Philadelphia school system examine the differential effects on that city's school children of no kindergarten, half-day kindergarten and full-day kindergarten. Their findings: kindergarten helps urban kids stay on grade level and avoid retention, and the full-day version is more powerful than the half-day kind. Moreover, in their view, it's cost-effective, because the savings that it yields (via reduced grade retention, etc.) help offset the cost of providing it. You can get a copy by calling 215-299-7770.

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Enhancing Urban Children's Early Success in School

Facing the Challenges of Whole-School Reform: New American Schools After A Decade

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 9, 2002

Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, RAND
2002

In this 222-page book, three members of RAND's education research team (Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly, Sheila Nataraj Kirby) summarize the findings from seventeen RAND studies of New American Schools (NAS), its school designs, and comprehensive school reform in general. It's a fine piece of work that probes the difficulty and complexity of the "comprehensive school reform" idea, the immense challenges of implementing it, the unreadiness of many of the NAS designs, the risks of "scaling up," the resistance to change among schools and school systems, the mixed results so far in terms of student achievement, and the inadequacy of typical outcome measures when it comes to capturing all this. Perhaps the most sobering line in the book: "Externally developed education reform interventions cannot be 'break the mold' and still be marketable and implementable in current district and school contexts." This volume is worth your while. The ISBN is 0833031333. You can obtain a copy for $28 or download each chapter in PDF form at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1498.

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Facing the Challenges of Whole-School Reform: New American Schools After A Decade

New American Schools, Driven By Results, A Decade of Experience, and other papers

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 9, 2002

New American Schools
2002

New American Schools (formerly New American Schools Development Corporation) recently released this 12-page self-study and self-promotion document which asserts-perhaps to nobody's surprise-that what they're doing is pretty terrific and what they're going to do in the future is better still. It stresses that NAS is about changing systems, not just constructing and disseminating school designs. And it summarizes some of NAS's new directions under the dynamic leadership of Mary Anne Schmitt. You can view a PDF at http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/policy.pdf. Also newly released by NAS is a trio of reports on Memphis, where that organization had made a large investment in education reform and where the former superintendent had made a large commitment to installing NAS designs in her city's schools. Her successor, however, opted to discard the NAS (and other "comprehensive school reform" or CSR) designs, claiming (on the basis of an internal study) that they weren't producing solid achievement results. NAS is now responding. The newest of these papers, by Tennessee State University professor James McLean, faults the methodology of the Memphis self-study and says that other studies showed solid results from that city's CSR effort. NAS has made two of those other studies available, both directed by Stephen Ross of the University of Memphis. (Somebody was in a hurry to get these out; he's "Stephen Ross, Ph.D." on one and "Steven M. Ross" on the other.) I don't know the truth about Memphis, and I have some

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New American Schools, Driven By Results, A Decade of Experience, and other papers

Staying on Course in Education Reform

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / May 9, 2002

Paul Barton, Educational Testing Service
April 2002

Paul Barton of the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center is a thoughtful, persistent fellow. In this 22-page paper, he argues (with some courage for an ETS person!) that education reform in America has gone overboard on testing and isn't using the right kinds of tests. He presses for a broader definition of reform, one that pays closer heed to curriculum and instruction as well as assessment-and also for improved testing, especially for distinguishing between the kind used for accountability purposes and the kind that helps teachers improve their classroom performance. You can download the report or order a hard copy for $10.50 at http://www.ets.org/research/pic.

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Staying on Course in Education Reform

Teachers' Professional Lives: A View from Nine Industrialized Countries

Terry Ryan / May 9, 2002

Carol F. Stoel and Tin-Swe Thant, Council for Basic Education
March 18, 2002

Is it easy to recruit and retain good teachers in other countries? How competitive are the rewards of teaching around the globe? Are teachers abroad paid more for teaching subjects in which there is a shortage of qualified teachers? These are just some of the questions that this insightful survey-produced by the Council for Basic Education with support from the Milken Family Foundation-hopes to answer. The survey grows out of the work of the Council for Basic Education's Schools Around the World (SAW) program, a partnership of nine countries (France, Portugal, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, Japan, Germany and the US). The bottom line of "Teachers' Professional Lives" is that U.S. policy makers and educators can learn a lot about effective ways to train and maintain good teachers by studying what happens in other lands. Some highlights:

• Teachers are rarely held accountable for student achievement (the US and the UK are exceptions).
• Teachers in most countries are paid less (in some instances much less) than professionals in other fields requiring similar academic credentials. The obvious exception is Japan. The authors note there may be a correlation between how Japanese teachers are treated and the country's high level of academic achievement.
• Japan's teachers are among the top five percent of high school graduates who successfully pass the country's national university entrance exam, as well as a

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