Education in Iraq

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 17, 2003

Iraq is blessedly free today, but it's also a mess in need of reconstruction. Not least among the many challenges facing those now tackling this massive project is creation of a new education system.

Once upon a time, Iraq had a well-functioning, if less than universal, 1920's-style British-style education system, consisting of primary and secondary schools and eight tertiary institutions, including a well-regarded medical school in Baghdad and one of the oldest Islamic universities on earth. After becoming a republic in 1958, Iraq strove to expand education access and boost literacy levels. The Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein, however, like all totalitarian governments, reshaped the system in its own image and, while technical training remained solid and contributed to Iraq's development (including its prowess with nasty weapons), the rest suffered mightily, including the notion that education should teach children to think and reason for themselves and to possess accurate information about their country and their world. All teachers had to join the Ba'ath party. And the curriculum was devoted to what a Washington Post correspondent termed "martyr building," with hyper-nationalistic and militaristic lessons that glorified Saddam while demonizing the west in general, the U.S. in particular, Israel, etc. An Iraqi ??migr?? recalls her teacher giving a lesson on Hitler's greatness "because he put the Jews in a room and burned them."

This perversion of an education system was further degraded after the Gulf War as economic sanctions, brain drains, inter-group conflict

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Education in Iraq

College instructors value grammar more than high school teachers do

April 17, 2003

College instructors value grammar more than high school teachers do

While college instructors rank "grammar and usage" as a student's most important writing skill, high-school teachers rank it as least important, and only 69 percent of high-school English teachers say they teach their students grammar and usage skills, according to a new survey by ACT. The grammar and usage section of the ACT exam produces the lowest scores of any ACT subtest, with the average score just below "borderline college-ready," which is surely one reason for the high enrollment in remedial writing courses among college freshmen.

"Grammar valued more in college than high school," by Rosalind Rossi, Chicago Sun-Times, April 9, 2003

"Survey finds split between what college instructors and high-school teachers value in student writing," by Megan Rooney, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2003 (subscription required)

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College instructors value grammar more than high school teachers do

L.A. school board votes to oppose state testing requirement

April 17, 2003

The Los Angeles Unified School Board voted unanimously last week to oppose the state's high school exit exam. The board, which has a new union-backed majority (at least for now - one union-backed incumbent still faces a run-off in May), hopes to influence the state board to postpone or drop the requirement that students pass an exit exam before being allowed to graduate from high school. Members of the state board say they will decide over the next few months whether to delay or change the graduation requirement.

"L.A. school board votes to oppose state exit exam," by Solomon Moore and Erika Hayasaki, Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2003

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L.A. school board votes to oppose state testing requirement

Seattle superintendent resigns amidst financial troubles

April 17, 2003

Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Joseph Olchefske announced his resignation earlier this week, saying that a $34 million financial crisis that has unfolded in the district on his watch has made it impossible for him to lead effectively. Last October, Olchefske announced that the district had overspent this year's and last year's budgets by a total of $34 million, a problem blamed on poor accounting practices and communication breakdowns. While the superintendent still had the support of a majority of school board members, the financial crisis had turned Olchefske into a lightning rod for a broad range of complaints about his leadership style and policy goals, which included firing incompetent principals and shifting budget authority to schools. The Seattle teachers union had also made plain that it didn't care for his reforms at all. Former superintendent John Stanford had hired Olchefske from a private sector job (investment banking) to become the district's CFO, and Olchefske's determination to push ahead on tough issues despite criticism, not to mention his lack of an education background, troubled many principals and teachers.

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Seattle superintendent resigns amidst financial troubles

The case for elected school boards

April 17, 2003

While eliminating elected school boards and replacing them with appointed boards or mayoral control is all the rage, AEI resident scholar Rick Hess argues in the April issue of the American School Board Journal that there is no reason to expect improvements to follow from such changed forms of governance. Appointees tend to get quietly captured over time by interest groups, Hess contends, and, given deep disagreements over the objectives that schools are to pursue and how they should pursue them, what we really need is more democratic school governance, not less. In another article in the same issue, Harold McGraw III describes the qualities and practices of a good board, whether it be a corporate board or a school board.

"The Voice of the People," by Frederick M. Hess; "Creating the Culture," by Harold McGraw III, American School Board Journal, April 2003 (not available online)

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The case for elected school boards

USDOE suggests that states create test-based routes to full teacher certification

April 17, 2003

States and districts have much more flexibility to meet the "highly qualified teacher" requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act than most people acknowledge; in fact, states have an historic opportunity to revamp their teacher preparation and certification systems, according to Michael Petrilli, Associate Deputy Under Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. In a speech given last week at a regional teacher quality summit in Austin, Texas, Petrilli challenged state and district leaders to imagine a new preparation and certification system for teachers that doesn't erect unnecessary barriers to talented people who want to teach, but instead seeks out talented people and brings them into schools. "If they want to, [states] can dramatically streamline their processes, and create alternate routes to full state certification that target talented people who would be turned off by traditional preparation and certification programs," Petrilli noted. "For example, states could adopt the new system created by the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence, an organization supported by a Department of Education grant that has created an extremely rigorous assessment system for new teachers, in both content areas and professional teaching knowledge," he continued. "States could decide that individuals who pass the relevant sections of the American Board assessment would be considered fully certified to teach, regardless of where they learned the important knowledge and skills that were tested. While good schools would certainly give those teachers strong mentoring, induction and professional

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USDOE suggests that states create test-based routes to full teacher certification

A Matter of Definition: Is there truly a shortage of school principals?

Terry Ryan / April 17, 2003

Center on Reinventing Public Education
Marguerite Roza, Mary Beth Celio, James Harvey and Susan Wishon
January 2003

This new report on principal shortages from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington describes a paradox: "There are plenty of 'certified' applicants, but there seems to be a dearth of candidates with high-level leadership skills." This finding, one of many interesting insights into the current pool of school-administrator candidates and who actually gets selected to lead schools, is based on a survey of district human resource directors, superintendents and other staff. The vast majority of school districts in the United States - most of the exceptions are urban schools, especially high schools - have enough candidates to fill their school leadership needs. In fact, there is a surfeit of certified educators who have absolutely no intention of ever actually leading a school-people who get certified, often using a state tuition subsidy, so as to move up their district's pay-scale. Despite this overcapacity in terms of certified leaders, there's a shortage of QUALITY leaders, the more so in the era of No Child Left Behind. Another fascinating finding in this report is that "human resource departments march to a different drummer.... While asserting they want people with leadership skills, human resource departments default to traditional qualifications, relying primarily on substantial years of teaching experience to cull their candidates." (In contrast, only a third of superintendents view teaching experience as highly

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A Matter of Definition: Is there truly a shortage of school principals?

Another Look at the New York City Voucher Experiment

Eric Osberg / April 17, 2003

Alan B. Krueger and Pei Zhu
Princeton University
April 2003

This paper closely examines - and reanalyzes - the data from the private voucher experiment in New York City, which were originally analyzed in a 2002 study by David Mayer, Paul Peterson, David Myers, Christina Tuttle and William Howell. The original work generated headlines based on the finding that black students using vouchers made significant academic gains. Here, Krueger and Zhu contest these claims and state that "the safest conclusion is probably that the provision of vouchers did not lower the scores of African American students." The controversy is rooted partly in the differing statistical methods of the two groups. For example, Krueger and Zhu argue that Peterson et al. chose an unnecessarily complicated design (which led to minor errors) and improperly excluded scores of those students for whom baseline data (initial test scores) were not available. Non-statisticians may have difficulty following the intricacies of these arguments, but a response to the Krueger and Zhu paper by Mayer and Myers (available at http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/PDFs/anotherlook.pdf) seems to accept the legitimacy of the methods suggested by Krueger and Zhu. Another matter of dispute is the definition of "black." The original research determined the race of the student by that of the mother alone; Krueger and Zhu broaden this to define as black any student for whom either parent is black. The new definition expands the black population and has the effect of reducing the test-score

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Perceived Effects of State-Mandated Testing Programs on Teaching and Learning: Findings from Interviews with Educators in Low-, Medium-, and High-Stakes States

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 17, 2003

National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy
January 2003

A group of people who don't much like testing and are affiliated with Boston College's famously anti-testing testing center, have grandiosely dubbed themselves the "National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy" (NBETPP), raised some money, hired a staff, and are now issuing research reports. This one is based on interviews (conducted in 2000-01) with teachers and school administrators in three states: low-stakes Kansas, medium-stakes Michigan and high-stakes Massachusetts. The big question was whether the "stakes" have a big impact on teaching and learning. Turns out there's no clear relationship. The authors (Marguerite Clarke and 5 colleagues) offer the utterly banal conclusion that "stakes are a powerful lever for effecting change, but one whose effects are uncertain; and that a one-size-fits-all model of standards, tests and accountability is unlikely to bring about the greatest motivation and learning for all students." They go on to make eight predictable recommendations. It's a yawner, but you can find it at http://www.bc.edu/research/nbetpp/statements/nbr1.pdf.

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Perceived Effects of State-Mandated Testing Programs on Teaching and Learning: Findings from Interviews with Educators in Low-, Medium-, and High-Stakes States

Shopping for Evidence Against School Accountability

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 17, 2003

Margaret E. Raymond and Eric Hanushek, Education Next
Summer 2003

In an editorial a couple of weeks ago (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=16#242), I mentioned a forthcoming work by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond that definitively rebuts "studies" by Audrey Amrein and David Berliner purporting to show that high-stakes accountability systems retard student achievement. That work is now available in two forms, and it's powerfully persuasive indeed. The Amrein-Berliner analyses, despite the vast publicity they attracted, are termed "fatally flawed both in design and in execution, rendering the conclusions irrelevant." Indeed, conclude Hanushek and Raymond based on their own analyses and their review of others, "[E]xisting evidence...suggests that accountability is associated with more rapid learning across grades." You can access two versions, a longish paper at http://www.educationnext.org/unabridged/20033/hanushek.pdf and a somewhat shorter article from the forthcoming issue of Education Next at http://www.educationnext.org/20033/pdf/48.pdf.

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Shopping for Evidence Against School Accountability

State Support to Low-Performing Schools

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 17, 2003

The Council of Chief State Schools Officers
March 2003

This 40-pager from the Council of Chief State School Officers profiles the efforts of five states (IL, LA, MD, NY, TX) to "support" low-performing schools and districts. But it's really a look at state-initiated efforts to intervene in such situations and turn them around. Since the ability of a state to repair low-performing districts - and the capacity of districts to turn around low-performing schools - is key to NCLB's prospects, this is a timely and important topic. The report, however, is descriptive, not analytic or judgmental. Perhaps because it was prepared by an organization that these states belong and pay dues to, it doesn't try to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of the (very different) approaches being taken by the five case-study states. You end it with the sense that "This is all very interesting but how well does any of it actually work in practice?" You may, however, want to see for yourself. You can find it at http://www.ccsso.org/pdfs/statesupport.pdf.

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State Support to Low-Performing Schools

Strategic Investment in Ideas: How Two Foundations Reshaped America

Eric Osberg / April 17, 2003

The Philanthropy Roundtable
John J. Miller
2003

This short but terrific publication from the Philanthropy Roundtable tells the stories of two prominent foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, that have been critically important in shaping the landscape of conservative thought, policy and social change over the past two decades. The book supplies brief histories of these organizations, highlighting their philosophies, strategies and contributions. Included therein is their huge significance to education reform. Olin has been a mainstay of Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, AEI and the Hoover Institution; it jumpstarted the Federalist Society, and helped found the field of law and economics. Bradley helped launch Milwaukee's voucher experiment and funded the subsequent legal battles to protect it from well-funded opponents. (Bradley was also instrumental in leading Wisconsin's welfare reform efforts, which helped inspire the national welfare reform movement in 1996.) And much else. At just sixty pages, this book is a quick read that even provides a bit of advice - culled from the Olin and Bradley experiences - for leading a foundation. You can get your own copy ($25 each, $15 for Philanthropy Roundtable members) by calling (202) 822-8333.

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Strategic Investment in Ideas: How Two Foundations Reshaped America