Choice may be addictive

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 19, 2002

School choice may be addictive: the more of it people get, the more they seem to want. Don't be fooled by news accounts of scant demand for the public-school choice provision of NCLB. That's a consequence of too few decent options for kids combined with foot dragging by school systems. Look instead at Florida and Cleveland, where the appeal of vouchers is spreading.

Though the Sunshine State's "Opportunity Scholarship" program is presently under a judicial cloud-as Florida appeals a circuit court ruling that it violates the state constitution-it's drawing hundreds more students than last year. Recall that this program kicks in when one's public school gets an "F" from the state accountability system in two years out of four. In that way, it resembles the NCLB public-school choice provision. In Florida, however, families also have the option of attending private schools at state expense, or public schools elsewhere. As of spring '02, ten schools enrolling 9000 youngsters were on the state's exit-eligible list. By the end of August, 577 students were claiming the state's $3900 scholarships to enroll in private schools-and another 900 were moving to other public schools. Meanwhile, some 9000 disabled youngsters are also taking their "McKay Scholarships" (which range from $4500 to $21,000) to attend private schools. Though these numbers are still just a small fraction Florida's two-million-plus K-12 enrollment, they're much larger than last year's.

Up north in Cleveland, by mid-August the Ohio Department of Education had

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Choice may be addictive

Confessions of a flag-waver

Diane Ravitch / September 19, 2002

Over the last few weeks, many have set out to answer the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism.

In a recent column on Slate.com, Jonathan Zimmerman argued that the question, "What lessons should we teach?" is the wrong question because it implies that we should transmit a single viewpoint or perspective about the attacks. Those who are attempting to answer the question, Zimmerman writes, break into two predictable camps: "the flag-wavers and the self-haters." Zimmerman charges that both camps share a deeply undemocratic assumption: that kids should agree with what they are taught and with those who teach them. Instead, he suggests, students should be presented with the views of both the "flag-wavers and the self-haters" and be allowed to make up their own minds, to come to their own conclusions about September 11th.

Someone needs to say a word for teaching America's core values and for waving the flag when appropriate. Here is my explanation.

Children are not born with an innate belief in the values of a free society. They are not born believing in the importance of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the other freedoms and rights that we hold dear. They are not

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Confessions of a flag-waver

NYC union creates curriculum to go with state standards

September 19, 2002

While standards-based reform is now the law of the land, teachers often complain that they don't have the resources they need to make the reform strategy work. To help bridge the yawning gap between standards and what actually happens in the classroom, the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City teachers, has spent $2 million to create a curriculum to match the state's standards in language arts. Resource guides for other subjects are in the works. The curriculum spells out state and city academic standards and provides detailed lessons for each grade level and examples of student work that meets the standards. Observers immediately labeled the effort an attempt by the union to boost its image as a professional organization devoted to enhancing education, not just a labor group out to protect the jobs of its members. A principal complained to New York Times reporter Abby Goodnough that it should be the role of the Department of Education to set instruction, not the role of a labor union that is also in the business of protecting teachers from bad ratings. Maybe so, but it's hard to fault the union for creating a useful resource for teachers, some of whom would otherwise struggle to implement New York State's standards in the absence of any real guidance from the state department of education or school district. If the curriculum doesn't quite measure up, then someone should step forward to

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NYC union creates curriculum to go with state standards

"K12" leads the way in virtual schooling

September 19, 2002

In a piece for Tech Central Station, Joanne Jacobs recently profiled K12, former Education Secretary William Bennett's kindergarten through twelfth-grade online curriculum and "virtual school" program. Students using K12's basic package receive daily lessons in all the core subjects-an additional package includes art and music-but spend less than one-third of their time online; the remaining time is spent working the old fashioned way: with textbooks, workbooks, and numerous other materials supplied by K12. While the for-profit company is expanding in the cyber charter world (independent public schools that provide lessons over the Internet) and attracting new converts to home schooling, some traditional home schoolers are wary of what they perceive as a threat to their independence. Find out more in "Teach the Children Well," by Joanne Jacobs, Tech Central Station, September 9, 2002.

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"K12" leads the way in virtual schooling

A new generation finds many new ways to cheat

September 19, 2002

No longer is cheating restricted to the jocks and 'slow' kids in the back of the room. Today's cheaters are tomorrow's Harvard freshmen-overachievers with too much to do and few qualms about finding the easiest way to produce a 5-page paper on King Lear. According to a disturbing story by Brigid Schulte in The Washington Post Magazine, while the crib sheet under the baseball cap is still in fashion, today's high school cheater is likely to have found the answers to the quiz in the teacher's own test file stored on the school's server, or on the Internet, which seems to be the answer to every student procrastinator's prayer. In the sink-or-swim world of high school today, students say that what matters most is the bottom line, and "'remorse,' says one student, 'just slows you down.'" See "Cheatin', Writin' & 'Rithmetic," by Brigid Schulte, The Washington Post Magazine, September 15, 2002, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4968-2002Sep11.html .

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A new generation finds many new ways to cheat

Internet access doesn't raise test scores

September 19, 2002

A recent study by two researchers at the University of Chicago confirmed what previous technology studies have found: simply giving schools access to the Internet does not automatically translate to gains in student achievement. Analyzing data from California, researchers found that eRate, the federal program that gives telecommunications discounts to schools and libraries (nearly $10 billion since 1999), helped connect schools to the Internet but did not affect test scores of students in those schools. Supporters of eRate respond by claiming that the program was designed to do nothing more than provide the infrastructure necessary to give students access to the Internet where they can gain skills crucial in today's workplace. "Study finds no link yet between internet access, test scores in California schools," eSchool News Online, September 12, 2002 (requires free registration).

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Internet access doesn't raise test scores

New deputy secretaries for innovation and improvement, safe and drug-free schools

September 19, 2002

Secretary of Education Rod Paige this week announced the formation of two new offices within the Education Department, the Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Nina Shokraii Rees will leave her job as deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney to serve as deputy undersecretary in charge of the new Office of Innovation and Improvement. It will assume responsibility for federal programs related to choice, charter schools, private schools, and magnet schools, and will work with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to implement the public school choice and supplemental services provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Office of Innovation and Improvement will also house many of the department's discretionary programs, such as Transition to Teaching. The Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, to be led by former Texas appeals court judge Eric Andell, will house all programs related to safe schools, crisis and response, alcohol and drug prevention, health and well being of students, and building strong character and citizenship. Press releases ("Paige Announces Formation of Two New Offices"; "Nina Shokraii Rees to Head New Office of Innovation and Improvement"; and "Eric D. Andell to Lead New Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools") are available at http://www.ed.gov/PressReleases/index.html.

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New deputy secretaries for innovation and improvement, safe and drug-free schools

Parents fight district effort to serve more disabled students in public schools

September 19, 2002

The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to offer more special education services at public schools rather than paying to send students to more expensive private schools, but parents are fighting the change. District officials want to serve more special ed students in-house as a way to cut costs and also to comply with a federal consent decree requiring the district to accommodate more special ed students in regular classrooms instead of placing them in special schools and centers. Since superintendent Roy Romer began implementing the plan, the number of requests for special legal hearings to resolve disputes doubled to nearly 1,000 annually. Romer complains that some parents misinterpret the district's obligation under federal law to provide "a free and appropriate public education" to mean they can garner all the services they want for their children. "Parents fight changes in special ed," by David Pierson, Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2002.

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Parents fight district effort to serve more disabled students in public schools

Spending more on special ed without breaking the bank

September 19, 2002

By transferring funds from ineffective and low-priority labor, health and education programs, Congress could increase funding for special education by billions of dollars and thereby go a long way toward "full" federal funding of the program-which was defined as 40 percent of average per-pupil spending in the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A brief policy memo from the Heritage Foundation spells out which unproductive programs Congress should ax in order to beef up special ed, and what the resultant "savings" would be. "Making Good on Promises to Increase Funding for Special Education," by Krista Kafer, The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, September 10, 2002.

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Spending more on special ed without breaking the bank

The Great Books make a comeback

September 19, 2002

Despite being branded racist, sexist and irrelevant to contemporary students' lives, the so-called "Great Books" are making a great comeback in some unlikely places: community colleges with largely minority student bodies, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, and Native American reservations, to name just a few. The appeal of the classics, the founders of the Great Books programs claim, is the same today as when Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Dubois studied them: they arm students with the knowledge needed to participate fully as citizens in our democracy. "'I Sit With Shakespeare and He Winces Not': The Great Books and the Burgeoning of Citizenship," by Katherine A. Kersten, American Experiment Quarterly, Summer 2002.

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The Great Books make a comeback

Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 19, 2002

Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services
September 2002

The Gadfly has previously grumped that Standard & Poor's much-discussed School Evaluation Services (SES) left something to be desired. (See, for example, Ray Domanico's guest editorial from November 2001 at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=82#1249.) The biggest problem then was that the data SES provided to its two main client states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, were all district wide, not school-specific. Our spirits lifted when SES issued terrific school-level reports on charter schools sponsored by Central Michigan University. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=50#1377.) Now we're even cheerier, for the latest evolution of SES analytic offerings is getting really useful. New district-level AND school-level reports for Michigan are accompanied by flexible analytic tools that can be accessed by policymakers, educators, analysts, and parents alike. You'll find a general description of these new offerings at
http://ses.standardandpoors.com/ and a revealing new analysis of Michigan school districts at http://ses.standardandpoors.com/pdf/mi_findings.pdf ("Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends"). Particularly tantalizing is S&P's newly developed "performance cost index," a way of comparing the dollar cost of attaining various education results, such as high-school graduation or passing levels on the Michigan assessment. Also available in this report is a discussion of Michigan districts that "achieve more with less", i.e. that get extra educational bang for the buck. Better still, if you poke into the Michigan portion of the SES website, you can now get down to the building level for every public school in the state and there

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Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends

Divided We Fall: Coming Together through Public School Choice

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 19, 2002

The Century Foundation
September 2002

If school choice were ice cream, this new 250-page report from the Century Foundation might be compared with slightly sour skim milk. It's a commission product, issued by a panel chaired by former U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker, a group that seems to have exhumed the worst social engineering ideas of the past four decades while dumping all over real school choice. We'll have more to say about it in an upcoming Gadfly. If you can't wait for the fuller review, surf to http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Detail.asp?ItemID=168.

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Divided We Fall: Coming Together through Public School Choice

Getting the Most from Technology in Schools

Kelly Scott / September 19, 2002

Noel White, Cathy Ringstaff and Loretta Kelley, WestEd
2002

WestEd has produced a short report reviewing extant research on the relationship between technology and learning. Because it is difficult to control for all the variables that affect learning, such research is basically inconclusive, but WestEd sought to identify the conditions under which technology seems to bring the greatest returns for students. They describe ten such conditions, ranging from the predictable (provide adequate, appropriate professional development and equipment; integrate technology within the curricular framework) to the slightly more noteworthy (change teacher beliefs about learning and teaching; include technology as "one piece of the puzzle"-the other pieces being accompanying reforms at the classroom, school and district levels). As the authors acknowledge, "perhaps not surprisingly, these conditions for enhancing the value of technology investments are essentially the conditions for improving student learning in general." You'll find a PDF edition of this report at http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/kn-02-01.pdf. The longer literature review on which this report is based can be found at http://www.WestEd.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619.

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Getting the Most from Technology in Schools

Knowing It By Heart: Americans Consider the Constitution and its Meaning

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 19, 2002

Public Agenda
September 2002

In collaboration with the National Constitution Center, Public Agenda has released this interesting and, for the most part, reassuring study of Americans' attitudes toward their Constitution and the principles enshrined therein. Based on a summer '02 survey of 1500 adults, this 66-page report confirms that Americans have deep respect for their Constitution and the governmental system it ordained, even if they don't regard themselves as very knowledgeable about it. Few find America perfect-and people want their children to be taught history "warts and all"-but the nation's failings are generally seen as incomplete fulfillment of its principles and aspirations rather than something basically awry in those principles. The survey shows post-9/11 Americans generally willing to empower government to root out threats to the national security, but it also reveals the expected divisions over specific policy issues such as abortion. You can find it on-line at http://www.publicagenda.org/specials/constitution/constitution.htm.

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Knowing It By Heart: Americans Consider the Constitution and its Meaning

Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education

Terry Ryan / September 19, 2002

edited by M. Suzanne Donovan and Christopher T. Cross, National Research Council
2002

As Congress debates reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) later this year and into next, reports like "Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education" by the National Research Council will receive much attention. The main point of this hefty volume, issued by the Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education, is that minority youngsters who are ill-prepared for school should first receive some quality classroom instruction and social support such as tutoring before being channeled into special education programs. IDEA should not become a perverse safety net for schools and communities that have failed to teach children basic skills. This report also reminds all who seek to shrink the achievement gap between white and minority students that the effort must start at the onset of their education, or even earlier. According to the Committee, "there is substantial evidence with regard to both behavior and achievement that early identification and intervention is more effective than later identification and intervention." Despite this fact, the report continues, "the current special education identification process relies on a 'wait-to-fail' principle that both increases the likelihood that children will fail because they do not receive early supports and decreases the effectiveness of supports once they are received." To meet the needs of at-risk children as well as those of gifted students, the Committee urges making certain that teacher licensing and certification requirements

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Public Alternative Schools and Programs for Students at Risk of Education Failure: 2000-01

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 19, 2002

National Center for Education Statistics
August 2002

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) used its "fast response survey system" to develop this report on alternative schools and kindred programs operating within public school systems. These turn out to be fairly widespread-almost 11,000 such schools and programs running in 39 percent of school systems and serving some 613,000 youngsters, mostly at the secondary level. You can learn a lot about these exceptionally varied programs from this report, including their entrance and exit criteria, the nature of their offerings, staffing and arrangements with other agencies. You cannot, however, learn some things you might find most interesting, such as how they are administered and how many are outsourced to private operators. You'll find a PDF copy at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002004.pdf.

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Public Alternative Schools and Programs for Students at Risk of Education Failure: 2000-01

The California Master Plan for Education

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 19, 2002

Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education, California state legislature
2002

One can never be sure that an education "master plan" will amount to more than the paper it's printed on, but California is at it again. After several years of labor, a joint committee of the legislature has given birth to this 240-page behemoth, which seeks both to overhaul the state's famed (but now four-decade-old) higher-education master plan and to offer the state a 20-years-into-the-future blueprint for K-16 education. Much heavy lifting lies ahead for any of this to become real, including such controversial provisions as turning the state's elected superintendent of public instruction into a gubernatorial appointee. Two years of (voluntary) public pre-school are sought by the authors, as is mandatory kindergarten, an end to "emergency" credentials for teachers, and so forth-all totaling 56 main recommendations and countless sub-recommendations. A few flashes of boldness can be found in these pages but, for the most part, this is a mainstream, "more of the same," "do it within the existing system" document that's long on regulations and resources and exceptionally thin on unconventional ways of doing things. You'll find little here that smacks of results-based accountability, for example, and virtually nothing that calls for choice, competition or the entry of teachers and principals via unconventional routes. You can download the report from www.sen.ca.gov/masterplan/.

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The California Master Plan for Education