Twas the day before vouchers

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 18, 2003

'Twas the day before vouchers, and all through the land
The foes of school choice had a further demand.
The bus routes were planned with extraordinary care,
Though Congress had acted with no time to spare.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of better schools danced in their heads;
Rod and Gene in their office, and Nina by phone,
Had reviewed all the risks and left unturned no stone.

When o'er on 16th street there arose such a clatter,
Even Margaret peered out to see what was the matter.
Off to the press club Jeanne flew like a flash,
Ready to dice union flunkies to hash.

(Everyone looked to the Post for a headline -
But it seems that this mischief came after their deadline.)

Then to our wondering eyes did march out
A vast picket line led by people with clout.
The elites had deployed their strongest troops
To force poor children to jump through more hoops.

More rapid than eagles these gray suits they came,
And they whistled, and shouted, and called out by name:
"Now, Sandy! now, Reggie! And you, Alfie Kohn.
On, PFAW! on AASA! on Houlihan and Norton!

"To the top of the Hill! to the top of the Court!
Now fight fiercely! fight fiercely! fight fiercely all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,

So up to the courthouse the bruisers they went,
With injunctions

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Twas the day before vouchers

Good, bad, and troubling

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 18, 2003

There is good news, bad news, and troubling nonsense associated with the 2003 big-city NAEP results (for 4th and 8th grade reading and math) released yesterday by the Department of Education. The good news is that ten major urban school systems are willingly participating in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, allowing their results to be held up for public inspection, and submitting to comparisons of results that can be harsh as well as revealing. Kudos to the Council of the Great City Schools for brokering this development, and to NAEP and the Education Department (and Congress) for - finally - enabling these important assessments to report student achievement for units smaller than whole states. It's called the "trial urban district assessment" but let's hope it lasts and spreads. It would make infinitely more sense for everybody's school system to do this, or at least have the option of doing this, rather than tolerating the motley array of non-comparable state and local tests that are the norm today.

The bad, albeit unsurprising, news is that most students in most of these districts did poorly. In fourth grade math, for example, only in three of the ten jurisdictions did the percentage of kids scoring in NAEP's

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Good, bad, and troubling

Mo' achievement, mo' money

December 18, 2003

In 1995, Texas philanthropist Peter O'Donnell started an incentive program aimed at improving the quality of Dallas public schools. Unlike most school reforms, this one was aimed at raising the bar for the highest achieving students in the school by awarding $100 rewards to all students who passed an Advanced Placement test, and $150 teacher bonuses for every student that passed. (A teacher could thereby earn a $3000 bonus if 20 students passed the test.) The results were staggering: over the next five years, the number of Dallas students passing the AP test jumped from 130 to 754 and the passing rate among minority pupils in Dallas is now "10 times higher than the national average for [minority] juniors and seniors."  Yet, rather than praising these terrific gains, criticism abounds. The ill-named "FairTest" outfit belittles the effort as "a curious direction, to throw more resources at those who don't need extra help." Another critic lamented that she once worked with a troubled high school student who became interested in Russian history, started to improve academically, worked up the courage to take the AP exam, but did not pass. "It would've been devastating to him if he knew other kids were getting money . . . and I wonder if he would've had the confidence to take the class if monetary rewards were given." We think the facts speak for themselves, but obviously for some, nothing is more suspect than success.

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Mo' achievement, mo' money

Union charges after charters

December 18, 2003

In October, Mike Antonucci and his invaluable Communiqu?? drew our attention to news that the California Teachers Association planned to spend $250,000 to organize teachers in Golden State charter schools. He now reports that CTA's parent organization, the National Education Association, plans to pour $1.75 million into a three-year effort to organize charter teachers nationwide.  No one can deny the right of workers to organize, or a union's right to try to grow by recruiting new members. But what, really, is going on here? Antonucci reports that "One high-ranking NEA official reportedly told board members that if the organizing campaign accomplishes nothing else, it might 'slow the creation of charter schools.'" Meanwhile, well-run charter schools unhampered by union contracts are doing fantastic work with kids across the land. Consider the stellar performance of Boston's 3-year old Codman Academy, a small urban high school that's in session 43 hours a week - and teachers phone parents at home on Sundays. Fancy trying that with "organized" teachers!
 
"NEA set to spend $1.75 million to organize charters," by Mike Antonucci, Communiqu??, December 15, 2003 (scroll down)

"A small scale attack on urban despair," by Sara Rimer, New York Times, December 17, 2003 (registration required)

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Union charges after charters

Straight talk across the pond

December 18, 2003

A recent report from the British government's Office of Standards in Education attributes the schools' continued failure to meet proficiency targets in math and English to "a stubborn core" of badly trained teachers with a poor grasp of subject knowledge - about one in eight teachers, it suggests. "Where teachers don't have that sort of knowledge they tend to be limited and therefore rather insecure in encouraging pupils to do more," said David Bell, the chief schools inspector. He added that teachers who lack adequate subject knowledge tend, somewhat counter intuitively, to talk more in class and thus stifle student creativity. In America, a federal official making such a claim in public would be tarred and feathered.
 
"Ofsted pins literacy blame on weak teaching," by Lucy Ward, The Guardian, December 10, 2003

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Straight talk across the pond

Southeast Asia: Short on cash, long on reform

December 18, 2003

Southeast Asian countries seem to be learning a lesson that's taking Americans longer to understand: bureaucracy should not get in the way of needed education improvements and the most important reforms are grounded in new forms of accountability, not larger budgets. As The Economist reported this week, "South-East Asian leaders are terrified that their countries will lose out on foreign investment and economic growth unless they produce more skilled workers. So they want to improve the quality of teaching and keep children in school longer." To do so, policy makers are employing innovative approaches that will allow needed education reform to occur even when they're strapped for cash. Thailand, for example, "is cutting the staff of the Ministry of Education by a third, and handing power over everything from budgets to uniforms to local school districts. Principals, in turn, will now be free to hire and fire teachers. Even parents are to be given a say." Even fiercely centralized countries like Indonesia and Vietnam "are experimenting with similar schemes."

"Banking on education to propel a new spurt of growth," Economist, December 11, 2003 (subscription required)

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Southeast Asia: Short on cash, long on reform

The nightmare of Cuban education

December 18, 2003

At the holidays, it's traditional to count your blessings. This essay in the Houston Chronicle reminds us that, whatever its flaws, America remains a bulwark of freedom, a blessing, and a shining ideal. The author, a Cuban mother, is pained when her five-year-old son returns from school singing the praises of five Cuban spies imprisoned in America for espionage. When she visits the classroom - in a state-run school, of course - she finds the teacher distributing plastic guns and encouraging the children to "shoot imperialism." This article gains even greater force from the fact that her son's father, a well-known Cuban dissident, is serving an 18-year sentence in a Cuban prison for his democratic activism. The mother is forced to walk a delicate line, between ensuring that her son honors his father's sacrifice and steering clear of activity that would invite dangerous attention from school officials who function as arms of a police state.
 
"In Cuba, the price of education is indoctrination," by Claudia Marquez Linares, Houston Chronicle, December 11, 2003

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The nightmare of Cuban education

Creating a Network of Charters in Buffalo: Report to the Buffalo Board of Education

Eric Osberg / December 18, 2003

Education Innovation Consortium
Fall 2003

The Buffalo Board of Education has undertaken a bold reform: creation of a network of charter schools, known as the Renaissance Project Schools, to be sponsored by the district itself. The hope is that, by offering such choices, Buffalo can improve educational variety and productivity, save some money, and at the same time spur the existing public schools to improve themselves. (See http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20031204/1020076.asp.) (subscription required) This report was commissioned by the Board to help them weigh this important decision. It is a coherent and logical production that enumerates the logic for charter schools, with references to numerous studies and writings on the topic. It also anticipates and addresses common concerns about charters. And it outlines the forms that such a network of charter schools might take in Buffalo. Along the way, analysts surveyed Buffalo parents about their attitudes toward charters. Though many expressed relative ignorance, most were supportive; parents want the best possible education for their children, regardless of who runs the schools. What's interesting about the proposal, however, is not just that those overseeing district schools came to support it but also the plan for a network of charters. As the report argues, "by coordinating with BPS around data and scheduling issues, and by pooling resources and investigating shared-service strategies, a charter network could serve children more effectively than

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Creating a Network of Charters in Buffalo: Report to the Buffalo Board of Education

Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 18, 2003

Lydia G. Segal
2003

This new book by attorney Lydia Segal (of John Jay College at CUNY) is a sort of companion to Making Schools Work, which she co-authored with William Ouchi. (For more information, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=112#1412.) Based on research in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, it exposes "systemic waste" and "embedded fraud" in the operations of those public school systems and shows how sizable sums intended to pay for education are being diverted to other purposes. Some of it is illegal; much is simply stupid, the costly consequence of a bureaucratic, rule-bound, procedure-obsessed system in which everything becomes pricier and less efficient than it should be. Besides illuminating and analyzing the problem, Segal offers solutions that track the prescriptions of Making Schools Work: radical decentralization of control and budget to individual schools combined with a variety of performance-based accountability and monitoring systems. As she writes at the end, "Given the crisis our city children face, it is time to change the status quo, stop providing incentives for abuse and waste, and give teachers, principals, and local managers the authority and responsibility to do what so many of them desperately want to do: help children and improve learning." The ISBN is 1555535844 and you can obtain additional information from the Northeastern University Press at http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/nupress-cgi/nupress.cgi?action=more_info&id=428.

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Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools

State-Funded Pre-Kindergarten: What the Evidence Shows

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 18, 2003

Department of Health and Human Services
December 2003

Head Start is not the whole story! This 35-page report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services describes and summarizes a number of state initiatives to mount pre-kindergarten programs at their own expense, and reviews what can be learned from extant evidence as to their effectiveness. Though not nearly enough solid studies have been conducted, "There is promising evidence that states can implement programs that produce positive outcomes in areas that include cognition, language, and academic achievement, with some positive outcomes, such as improved achievement test scores, reduced grade retention, and school attendance, lasting into the elementary grades." The report also notes that "several" states (e.g., Kentucky, California, the Carolinas) have developed imaginative approaches to school readiness that span health, welfare, and education. This is no bell-ringer report, but the (anonymous) HHS authors conclude that "selected states appear ready" to "undertake the administration of a coordinated and comprehensive early childhood education system that includes a strong evaluation component to measure results." If you'd like to see for yourself, you can find it on the web at http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/state-funded-pre-k/index.htm.

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State-Funded Pre-Kindergarten: What the Evidence Shows

Head of the Class: Characteristics of Higher Performing Urban High Schools in Massachusetts

Carolyn Conner / December 18, 2003

Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC
Fall 2003

By studying the characteristics of successful schools in urban Massachusetts districts, this report tries to distill effective school improvement strategies and "forward the practice and policy discussion by providing a platform from which to assess current policies on urban high school organization and management." The authors examined nine urban schools identified as "improving." While each of the nine used unique strategies and practices, some practices were common to all, including high standards and expectations, data-driven curricula, a culture of personalization, strong community relationships, and small learning communities. The authors admit that their research merely skims the surface of the issue (they only spent "about a day" at each of the schools they studied), but their initial findings are worth perusing. Check it out at https://www.massinc.org/about/cerp/research/head_of_class/head_of_class.pdf. Or skip the report and visit Codman Academy instead!

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Head of the Class: Characteristics of Higher Performing Urban High Schools in Massachusetts