The power of one

Kathleen Porter-Magee / December 4, 2003

Observations from the NCSS annual conference

For an organization that claims to value diversity and debate as much as the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), precious little of either was to be found at its very own annual conference, held in Chicago in mid-November and attended by some 5,000 social studies teachers, professors, and itinerant experts. In fact, after scouring the program in search of sessions where the goals of social studies itself would be examined and, perish the thought, debated, I came up nearly empty. So I attended some other sessions.

The first was a series of presentations organized by the College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA), an NCSS affiliate. I was interested because these papers were textbook evaluations and, since we at Fordham are nearing publication of our own review of history textbooks, I hoped these university professors' findings might be instructive. And they were, albeit not quite in the fashion intended by their authors.

One analyzed the portrayal of the United States in Canadian textbooks. The author traced her findings from textbooks published from the late 1800s through 1970 - a peripheral topic and an analysis that stopped just when it might have gotten interesting.

The other claimed to examine "commonly used middle level social studies books" with an eye toward how they "depict American culture, society and lifestyle in comparison with the rest of the world." In reality, the analysis focused mainly on how the textbooks failed

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The power of one

Ernie is to Bert as...

December 4, 2003

According to Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, the First Amendment's Establishment and Free Exercise clauses are the "constitutional equivalent of Ernie's relationship to Bert - in that no one really wants to say out loud that they hate each other." Last year, in Zelman v. Harris, the Court dealt with the first clause, and found that providing public money to religious schools in the form of school vouchers does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This week, the Court heard arguments in Locke v. Davey, a case that challenges the constitutionality of Washington state's Blaine Amendment under the second clause. (Blaine Amendments, named after 19th century Republican Representative James G. Blaine, were added to 37 state constitutions after Blaine's failed 1875 attempt to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution barring governments from providing any public money to "sectarian" - read, Catholic - schools.)

In this case, Joshua Davey claimed that his First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion was violated when Washington State rescinded its state-funded Promise Scholarship only after he declared that he would double major in pastoral ministry and business. (The state's scholarships are awarded

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Ernie is to Bert as...

And more voucher news

December 4, 2003

This year, Colorado became the first state to pass a statewide voucher program after last year's landmark Zelman ruling. A legal challenge to the program was inevitable, but we were truly astonished to hear that a district judge has barred the Colorado school voucher program on the grounds that it violates "local control" of schools. (Article IX, Section 15 of the Colorado constitution provides that the local boards of education "shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.")  In his ruling, Judge Joseph E. Meyer determined that the voucher law, which allows parents to use tax dollars to attend private schools that are outside of the jurisdiction of the local school board, violates this "local control."
 
Of course, control of instruction in the public schools is a very different thing from controlling the funding of schools generally - a power that is clearly vested in the Colorado General Assembly and in locally elected officials who have the power to tax and spend. And as Chip Mellor, President of the Institute for Justice - the group representing the state in the case - pointed out, "the state's role in

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And more voucher news

Houston, we have a problem

December 4, 2003

The New York Times has lowered the boom on the "Texas Miracle," claiming that its own analysis of SAT-9 test scores of Houston ISD students from 1999-2002 shows that the district made at best modest gains in reading and math, despite claims (based on the now-defunct TAAS assessment) that Houston schools had dramatically increased scores and closed the minority achievement gap. As far as statistics go, the Times' analysis seems persuasive. After all, there is no doubt that some of the claims made on behalf of Houston schools were overstated when compared against national tests. The district has made some gains (unusual for a district of its size and beset with the challenges it faces, we'd note) but hardly the kind that could be called a "miracle." It's the Times' rather disingenuous reading of the political situation and implications that we take issue with. For example, the No Child Left Behind act does not require states and districts to "match Houston's success and bring virtually all children to academic proficiency," as the Times tendentiously remarks. And, Houston's record has little bearing on whether the federal government, through its Title I funding, ought to require schools to close the achievement gap and bring all students up to proficiency. The Times concludes that Houston's achievement gains were the result of a too-easy test, which Texas has already begun to correct on its own by scrapping the TAAS in favor of the more-rigorous

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Houston, we have a problem

Board bashing bonanza!

December 4, 2003

A remarkable two-part story in the Post-Gazette questions the need for and usefulness of school boards, those dinosaurs of progressive politics. Some researchers are coming to believe (as Gadfly has for some time; see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=120#1505) that school boards are often "composed of unskilled, unprepared people elected by a tiny turnout of voters, and that they handicap the students they're supposed to help." The articles add lots of color to the position that school boards are frequently unruly, incompetent, and almost completely in the pocket of unions: stories of school board members banging their shoes on tables to make their points, Kruschev-like; school board members who want to micromanage decisions like what color shoes the football team should wear; and even school board members who have turned violent, including one Pennsylvania board member who ran over the school police chief with her car. The fixes suggested by many proponents of school boards - including paying school board members to attract higher-quality candidates, more professional development, and rigging elections to assure that all parts of the community are represented - strike us as less efficient than the obvious answer: get rid of them. They're too often a waste, a hindrance, and an entrenched enemy of reform.
 
"School boards'

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Board bashing bonanza!

Maryland adopts high school exit exam

December 4, 2003

Yesterday, the Maryland state board of education voted 9-2 to make the state's high school assessment tests a requirement for graduation beginning with the class of 2009. The move makes Maryland one of 19 states that have mandated graduation exit exams. According to the proposal, by 2009 all students would be required to pass at minimum the state's "functional tests" in reading, math, and writing to earn a local diploma, but to earn a full-fledge state diploma, they must also pass tests in algebra, English, government and biology. Severely disabled students, who will be exempted from the state's regular tests, will be awarded a certificate of completion. While some board members fear that the new testing requirement will dramatically increase the number of drop-outs in the state, Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, notes that "although states normally see a slight increase in their dropout rates the first year that exit exams are in place, there is no long-term link to the number of students who leave school."

"Md. to give class of '09 exit exams," by Ylan Q. Mui, Washington Post, December 4, 2003

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Maryland adopts high school exit exam

Diamonds in the rough

December 4, 2003

Too often for our taste, articles in the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development's magazine Educational Leadership reflect the status quo. But sense shone through in a recent issue on "The Challenges of Accountability," especially in articles by Craig Jerald and Frederick Hess. Jerald, in "Beyond the Rock and the Hard Place," calls on teachers and administrators to quit complaining about the requirements of accountability and get the job done, and to stop excusing problems like push-outs or teachers cheating on standardized tests as inevitable consequences of holding people accountable. Hess, in "The Case for Being Mean," makes, well, the case for being mean - or better put, the case for accountability systems that have incentives and sanctions ("mean") as well as provide increased resources in the way of professional development, training, and support ("nice"). Both articles are worth reading, though only Jerald's is online. 
 

"The Challenges of Accountability," Educational Leadership, November 2003, vol. 61, no. 3

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Diamonds in the rough

Rolling Up Their Sleeves: Superintendents and Principals Talk About What's Needed to Fix Public Schools

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 4, 2003

Steve Farkas, Jean Johnson, and Ann Duffett, Public Agenda
November 2003

The non-partisan research organization, Public Agenda, has conducted many illuminating education surveys and studies. This latest report continues in that vein, though its policy implications are somewhat blurry. Supported by the Wallace Foundation, it's the second half of a two-part examination of principals' and superintendents' views of their role, their effectiveness, and the conditions of their work. (The first appeared as a 2001 report entitled Trying to Stay Ahead of the Game. See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=82#1257.) The main message here, as summarized by Wallace Foundation president Christine DeVita: "Even as leaders report that they are focusing as never before on curriculum, instruction, mentoring, and professional development . . . they are hamstrung by red tape, competing laws and regulations, and inadequate resources to meet increased requirements and mandates." Two-thirds of them feel, for example, that it's hard to discipline troublesome kids due to excessive emphasis on documentation and due process. Nearly everyone grumps about overweening federal, state, and local mandates. Special ed consumes more than its share of money and attention. And so on through a long litany of complaints. A more vivid summary of these administrators' view of their roles can be found in Public Agenda president Ruth Wooden's "afterword," where she writes, "The daily travails of their jobs sound like a description of a particularly noisy video game, with an enormous array of obstacles hurtling from all directions, requiring

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Rolling Up Their Sleeves: Superintendents and Principals Talk About What's Needed to Fix Public Schools

Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress

Terry Ryan / December 4, 2003

Paul E. Barton, Educational Testing Service
November 2003

The basic premise of this report is straightforward: efforts to close the achievement gaps between whites and minorities, rich and poor, will be for naught unless policy makers, educators, and parents recognize and address the multiplicity of factors - both in school and out - that cause them. This meta-synthesis of the most respected studies of student achievement includes a review of data from the National Center for Education Statistics, data from Child Trends, and the seminal work of researchers like James Coleman, Anthony Bryk, Terry Moe, and Eric Hanushek. The factors influencing academic achievement are "parsed" by the author into 14 "correlates of school achievement." The correlates fall under three general categories - early development, the school environment, and home learning environment - and range from weight at birth, to lead poisoning, to teacher quality, to class size, to the amount of television watched, to parent participation in a child's school. In all 14 correlates of achievement, there were gaps between the minority and majority student populations. The report concludes that identifying the range of factors that influence student achievement is the first step to doing something about the problems. True enough, we guess, though we do already know something about how to shrink the achievement gap--take for example the KIPP model and the systematic reforms well outlined in "No Excuses" (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=116#1461), a startling book that chronicles many of the

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Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress

Closing the College Participation Gap: A National Summary

Carolyn Conner / December 4, 2003

Sandra S. Ruppert, Education Commission of the States
October 2003

Using information from the 2000 census, this report provides discouraging data on both high school graduation and college participation rates. Paralleling the significant achievement gap in K-12 education, high school graduation and college participation rates vary greatly when the numbers are broken down by race/ethnicity. For example, while 33.6 percent of white American adults have a college degree, only 14.7 percent of Hispanic adults and 20 percent of African-American adults have a college degree. The report makes several recommendations, none earth-shattering, to state policy makers, including the importance of getting reliable data that will help "tell the story about performance conditions in their state." Based on this information, Ruppert feels policy makers can then focus on the specific students' needs by targeting the growing parts of the population without proper access to college. We suspect that the solution to the problem has more moving parts than that, but sunshine is still the best disinfectant. The detailed state-by-state information is available on the Center for Community College Policy website, http://www.communitycollegepolicy.org/html/top.asp?page=Issues/Access/Access_map.asp and the national summary can be found here.

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Closing the College Participation Gap: A National Summary