Realizing the spirit of IDEA

Patrick Wolf / September 12, 2002

Special education is receiving a lot of attention these days. The federal program to provide special accommodations and services to students with disabilities has been critiqued by a Presidential Commission, by multiple authors of a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Progressive Policy Institute volume, and by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. Although there is some overlap in opinions about how IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) should be reformed, Democrats (and a certain Independent Senator) tend to argue that the system is merely under-funded, Republicans that it fails to deliver clear results, and less partisan academics that it is over-regulated and obsessed with proceduralism.

Into the fray recently jumped Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark (D-CA) with HR 5001, the "Realizing the Spirit of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act." His basic proposal is to allow states to earn their way to full funding of the federal share of special education by narrowing various yawning outcome gaps between their regular and special-needs student populations.

In the U.S. today, special education primarily takes the form of an under-funded federal mandate. Federal laws bestow upon disabled students certain rights regarding their education. These include the right to a diagnosis by a trained professional to determine if the child suffers from a disabling condition that affects learning. Students diagnosed with a disability are then guaranteed a "free and appropriate public education" at taxpayer expense. Congress once "pledged" to pay 40% of the additional cost of educating

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Realizing the spirit of IDEA

Leading the charge against effective reading instruction

September 12, 2002

The Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, offers $5 billion over six years to states and school districts to support research-based reading instruction, but not everybody is happy about the strings attached to this funding. In a front-page story in Tuesday's Washington Post, reporter Valerie Strauss gives voice to critics of Reading First who try to paint the program as "promoting corporate control of the education of our children."

Detractors have two main gripes: that the Education Department will only provide funds for programs that explicitly teach phonics, and that the Department is strongly encouraging the use of certain commercial phonics-based programs that are highly structured or scripted. The first complaint flies in the face of solid evidence that explicit instruction in phonics is crucial for children struggling to read, and only a few holdouts at the International Reading Association (naively described by Strauss as apolitical) continue to claim otherwise.

The second complaint, that the Education Department is pushing specific phonics-based reading programs, is denied by officials there, who say that there is no magic list of approved reading programs. Any list of demonstrably effective reading programs, however, would by necessity include highly structured or scripted programs like Direct Instruction, since independent research has found them to be among the most successful at teaching children to read, and the Department of Education has, in fact, mentioned some of these programs as examples of effective reading

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Leading the charge against effective reading instruction

A day in the life of an elementary school student

September 12, 2002

Researchers from Teachers College and the University of Maryland sought to find out "what actually happens to children during an entire school day" so they asked elementary teachers to complete a time diary. From this, they computed how much time was spent on academic subjects, enrichment activities (for example, art, music, and health instruction), maintenance activities (like packing up or traveling between classrooms), and recess, with results broken down by students' race, gender, grade, special needs, family characteristics, and classroom characteristics. They found that white students were significantly more likely to have longer school days, that minority students spent more time on core subjects at the expense of recess and enrichment activities, that students in larger classes spent more time on academics, and that the type of school (private or public) explained a large percentage of the variance in the uses of students' time. "What Happens During the School Day?: Time Diaries from a National Sample of Elementary School Teacher," by Jodie Roth, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Miriam Linver and Sandra Hofferth, Teachers College Record, 2002 (free registration required).

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A day in the life of an elementary school student

Confronting an achievement gap at Berkeley High

September 12, 2002

Berkeley High-the only public high school in Berkeley, California-sends many of its students on to top colleges but consigns just as many to failure. Though the school, one of the first in the land to desegregate voluntarily, is highly diverse, a UC Berkeley study concluded that it suffers from "apartheid-like segregation," with white students racing ahead in Advanced Placement courses and poorly prepared black students struggling to keep up in a "sink-or-swim" atmosphere. Learn about the school's desperate attempts to close its exposed achievement gap-which likely went undetected before the era of standards and testing-in "Top-Notch School Fails to Close Achievement Gap," by John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2002.

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Confronting an achievement gap at Berkeley High

Innovative personnel practices in charter schools

September 12, 2002

Are charter schools really different? Two studies published by the Fordham Foundation in recent years found that charter schools were serving as promising seedbeds for new approaches to finding, employing, and keeping better teachers. These innovative policies are described in "Do Charter Schools Do It Differently" by the Gadfly's own Chester Finn and Marci Kanstoroom, published in the September 2002 Phi Delta Kappan (which is not available online). The two reports that underlie this article, "Personnel Practices in Charter Schools" and "Autonomy and Innovation: How Do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom," are available at http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=4.

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Innovative personnel practices in charter schools

Is it time for school boards to be accountable, too?

September 12, 2002

Elected urban school board members are not accountable to the public, possess modest skills, are conflict-prone and politicized, and cannot work successfully with superintendents, concludes University of Memphis professor Tom Glass in a yet to be published report described by Jay Mathews at WashingtonPost.com. Glass, who has spent a career studying school district leadership, thinks mayors or governors ought to select school board members and thinks school boards ought to be independently evaluated, with ineffective board members removed. See "Playing Politics in Urban City Schools," by Jay Mathews, Washingtonpost.com, September 10, 2002

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Is it time for school boards to be accountable, too?

Liberals and choice

September 12, 2002

The following appeared on The Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" page on September 9:
"In a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, one April Falcon Doss explains why she chose to send her daughter to a private school:
For a card-carrying liberal, I was surprisingly unapologetic about our decision. Why should I sacrifice our daughter's future to an abstract principle? I wasn't up to battling the school system about class size, curriculum and extracurricular activities. And by the time any changes could be made, our daughter would have already missed out on a vibrant education.
Here in a nutshell is the definition of an American liberal: one who is willing to sacrifice the future of other people's children to an abstract principle." From "My Public Spirit Stops at My Daughter" at http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110002241.

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Liberals and choice

Teacher pay experiment in Chattanooga

September 12, 2002

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mayor has developed a performance-pay plan whereby teachers and principals in struggling schools will earn big bonuses if their students make significant progress on state tests. Inspired by the plan, twelve top teachers have made the move to at-risk schools in the city. For details see "More teachers graded for their pay," CNN.com, September 9, 2002.

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Teacher pay experiment in Chattanooga

Try your hand at American history, NAEP style

September 12, 2002

Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered its latest U.S. history assessment to approximately 29,000 students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in schools across the country. NAEP's web site now offers the public the opportunity to test their knowledge of American history and see how their performance stacks up against students in the nationwide sample. Visitors to the web site can answer actual multiple choice questions from the 2001 NAEP, can see how many students answered the same questions correctly, and can then read about the knowledge that NAEP's architects intended for those questions to test. Check it out at http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/kidsquiz/index.asp?flash=false.

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Try your hand at American history, NAEP style

What it's like to teach seventh grade

September 12, 2002

Reporter Larry Slonaker took a one year leave of absence from The Mercury News to fulfill a lifelong dream of teaching in a California public school (using an emergency teaching credential). Surprised as much by his own deficiencies as by his students' woeful lack of skills, he deems his stint as a seventh grade language arts teacher "surprising, irritating, elevating, frustrating," but most of all, hard. See "My year as a teacher," by Larry Slonaker, The Mercury News, August 25, 2002.

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What it's like to teach seventh grade

What makes Rod Paige tick?

September 12, 2002

A long story in The Christian Science Monitor looks at where Rod Paige came from to try to understand how he became so single-minded about leaving no child behind. Reporter Amanda Paulson interviewed neighbors, family members and former colleagues for this colorful portrait of the Secretary of Education. "True believer," by Amanda Paulson, The Christian Science Monitor, September 10, 2002.

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What makes Rod Paige tick?

Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate

Allison Cole / September 12, 2002

Richard Fry, The Pew Hispanic Center
September 5, 2002

Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this report finds that large numbers of Latino high school graduates-10 percent, as compared to 7 percent of the total population of high school graduates-are enrolled in college-level courses, but Latino students are more likely than any other group to enroll in two-year programs or as part-time students. A greater proportion of Latino high school graduates enroll in post-secondary education after the age of 24, and fewer Latinos pursue graduate and professional degrees. Author Richard Fry is concerned about the number of Hispanics who pursue educational paths associated with lower chances of earning a bachelor's degree, but when he turns to hypothesizing about why this is the case, the ground on which he rests grows shakier. For example, Fry explains the high level of enrollment by Hispanics in community colleges by stating that "an emphasis on close family ties is one characteristic shared by most Latinos...and among Latino immigrants this often translates into an expectation that children will live with their parents until they marry" so they will not choose to enroll in institutions where they might need to reside on campus. The author's assumption here may or may not be true, but if he wishes to boost the number of Hispanic college graduates, he will need more data, and fewer assumptions, about what causes these low graduation rates. "Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll,

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Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate

Liberating Teachers: Toward Market Competition in Teacher Representation

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 12, 2002

Myron Lieberman, Cato Institute
August 28, 2002

The Cato Institute recently issued this 14-page paper by veteran crusader Myron Lieberman, arguing that public-school teachers themselves are ill-served by the monopoly that results from having just two teacher unions (one in most places) and that they'd be better off with greater competition among providers of "representation." "Such reform would open up competition to non-membership organizations, solo entrepreneurs, negotiators, lawyers, and college bargaining companies. Teachers would retain the right to go without an exclusive representative, and each representation option would compete against all the others." An interesting idea, cogently presented in this paper, which you can find at http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-450es.html.

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Liberating Teachers: Toward Market Competition in Teacher Representation

Research and Rhetoric on Teacher Certification: A Response to "Teacher Certification Reconsidered"

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 12, 2002

Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002

In this long article, also found in the dubious on-line holdings of the Phoenix-based Education Policy Analysis Archives, Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond responds to the October 2001 report on teacher certification by the Abell Foundation ("Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality," by Kate Walsh, Abell Foundation, 2001, http://www.abell.org/TeacherCertReconsidered.pdf) and to Secretary Paige's use of that report in his own recent "Annual Report on Teacher Quality." ("Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary's Annual Report on Teacher Quality," by Rod Paige, US Department of Education, June 2002, http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf) This is not Professor Darling-Hammond's first response, but she will henceforth claim that it's a "peer-reviewed" study. It concludes just what you would expect, that Abell was wrong in a hundred ways and that the Secretary of Education was wrong to rely on Abell. So be it. That debate will continue. But the essay also contains this fascinating admission by Darling-Hammond: "It is true that certification is a relatively crude measure of teachers' knowledge and skills, since the standards for subject matter and teaching knowledge embedded in certification have varied across states and over time, are differently measured, and are differently enforced from place to place." Well said. Nobody ever contended that certification matters not at all. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. The big question is whether going through the things one goes through to get certified should be the only possible pathway

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Research and Rhetoric on Teacher Certification: A Response to "Teacher Certification Reconsidered"

The Effectiveness of "Teach for America" and Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement: A Case of Harmful Public Policy

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 12, 2002

Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner, Education Policy Analysis Archives
September 6, 2002

The title and subtitle will give you a sense of the objectivity of the so-called on-line "peer-reviewed scholarly journal" named Education Policy Analysis Archives, edited by Gene V. Glass. Like most such journals in education, it obviously selects peers who agree with its editors' policy biases and those of the authors whom they like and wish to publish. In this case, the authors are Ildiko Laczko-Kerr, who currently works at the Arizona Department of Education, having recently completed a doctorate at-where else?-Arizona State University, where her co-author, David C. Berliner, is a bigfoot in the College of Education and where this "journal" is "published." (The article is derived from Dr. Laczko-Kerr's dissertation, entitled "Teacher Certification Does Matter.") The early pages contain a thoughtful review of some previous research on the interaction of subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical prowess in influencing the effectiveness of public-school teachers. Not too surprisingly, they conclude that teachers tend to be more effective when they know something about what they're teaching, and that knowledge becomes more consequential as grade levels rise. The new "research," however, leaves much to be desired. The authors picked five Arizona school districts with teacher shortages, mostly low income communities, then selected "matched pairs" of certified and "under-certified" teachers who began work in their public schools in 1998 or 1999. (Of the "under-certified" group, two-thirds held "emergency" certificates which, it is commonly

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The Effectiveness of "Teach for America" and Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement: A Case of Harmful Public Policy

The Religious Factor in Private Education

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 12, 2002

Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
July 2002

Economists Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman of Ben-Gurion University wrote this "occasional paper" for the series produced by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia. It turns out to be an extremely interesting if quite technical "political economy model of education finance and school choice in which parents who differ in the advantage they attribute to religious education choose from among public, private nonsectarian and religious schools." The analysis, says the authors, "[S]upports the implicit conclusion of the [U.S. Supreme] Court, that participation of religious schools in the Cleveland voucher program was essential for achieving its goal of helping low-income parents in a failing school district." That is partly because the voucher amount was too low to enable low-income parents to exercise choice in any way other than by enrolling their kids in parochial schools. But it also bespeaks a preference among many parents for a religious education for their children. "Larger vouchers would have reduced the share of religious schools in the [Cleveland] program, though they would still have attracted a majority of students." Strikingly: "If unrestricted voucher funding of religious education should be allowed, our analysis suggests that, holding the tax rate fixed, a majority coalition of religious and high-income households would prefer receiving an unrestricted voucher and having public education discontinued, to

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The Religious Factor in Private Education