Reforming Education: The Hard Part Lies Ahead

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 9, 2003

As 2003 opens, hollow public treasuries will make it tougher than ever to revitalize American K-12 education - not because more money will improve our schools but because the most painful parts of the reform process lie ahead and, without dollars to cushion the discomfort, politicians will be loath to ask people to endure it.

The education renewal efforts of the past decade were easy compared with the miseries of the next few years. We've passed the laws, designed the necessary changes and put measuring sticks in place, but by and large we haven't yet caused many people or institutions to alter their ways.

That's why, as we approach the twentieth anniversary of "A Nation at Risk", America's overall education performance remains woeful. Test scores are mostly flat. Graduation rates are actually sagging. Racial gaps are still wide. "Failing school" lists contain thousands of entries. Dozens of countries outstrip us on international gauges of student achievement, and some now also boast higher college-going rates.

We surely haven't been idle or chintzy. We've spent billions on reforms of every sort. We've shrunk classes, hired more teachers, installed computers, built new schools, stiffened graduation requirements, added kindergartens, replaced textbooks, devised tests, written manifestos, conducted studies, held summits, set standards, created charter schools, experimented with vouchers, out-sourced school management, "in-serviced" teachers, hired nontraditional superintendents, and on and on. Dozens of governors have pledged to turn around their states' education systems. George W. Bush persuaded Congress

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Reforming Education: The Hard Part Lies Ahead

Burning High-Stakes Testing at the Stake

Greg Forster / January 9, 2003

The New York Times recently gave lavish attention to a "study" conducted by Arizona State University's David C. Berliner and Audrey L. Amrein, and funded by the teachers' unions, that purports to show that high-stakes tests don't promote student learning. In fact, however, the Times has called our attention to a perfect example of how not to study high-stakes testing. Along the way, it has helped mislead the nation as to the actual impact of one of the most important education reform strategies now underway.

Senior author Berliner has long opposed high-stakes testing, and he and his colleague leave readers in no doubt as to their views on the subject. They provide a tendentious history of the high-stakes testing movement in which, to take only one example, the perception that U.S. schools aren't providing an adequate education is said to have originated not from the system's faltering performance, but rather from public fears of Soviet technological superiority after the launch of Sputnik. They also inform us that advocates of high-stakes testing "derive satisfaction" from "punishing the slackers" in the public education system. This theme will not surprise followers of Berliner's repeated Panglossian efforts to say that U.S. K-12 schools are basically doing OK and that those who say otherwise are enemies of public education.

The authors make much of the finding that states with many low-performing poor and minority students are more likely to adopt high-stakes accountability testing. This fact, however, is

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Burning High-Stakes Testing at the Stake

Autism on the rise, or just its diagnosis?

Sandra Stotsky / January 9, 2003

While some have blamed skyrocketing expenditures for special education on an increase in children with disabilities, it has been hard to find solid evidence that the number of students with certain disabilities has increased; it seems more likely that the diagnosis of those disabilities is what has increased. A recent New York Times article about autism illustrates the problem. While the headline trumpeted "Study Shows Increase in Autism," the study described in the article did not actually demonstrate, or even claim, that there has been an increase in autism. Researchers did find many more children identified as autistic today than in the 1980s but, as the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote in its editorial accompanying the study: "Although it would be tempting to interpret this age trend as indicative of a secular increase in the rate of ASD ... such an explanation is both unlikely and biologically implausible... Rather the authors suggest that these differences might reflect new diagnostic criteria for autism and increased availability of developmental disability services for children with autism during the 1990s." (p. 87) There is a very important difference between a true increase in the prevalence of a disorder and an increase in the identification of people with that disorder. The New York Times article confuses the two, thereby misleading readers.

"Study Shows Increase in Autism," by Sandra Blakeslee, The New York Times, January 1, 2003 (abstract only, full article for purchase)

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Autism on the rise, or just its diagnosis?

Consequences-intended and not-of merit scholarships for college

January 9, 2003

Merit scholarship programs like Georgia's HOPE scholarships - which pay full tuition and fees at any public university or community college in the state (or an equivalent amount for students attending private institutions) for state residents who maintain a grade point average of 3.0 in high school and college - get criticized because they tend to benefit students from well-off families more than students from low-income families. Several papers presented at the American Economic Association's recent conference have identified other effects of the scholarship programs: they apparently induce college students to take fewer credit hours per semester in order to keep their GPA's above the minimum; they are associated with an increase in attrition rates at some four-year schools, perhaps because they attract some students to universities who might have been better off at community colleges; they have been associated with steep increases in tuition at private universities; and they are associated with an increase in car registrations, possibly because well-off parents bribe their children to attend state universities rather than out-of-state schools by buying them new cars! One defender of the scholarship programs, John Bishop of Cornell University, notes that they are well-targeted to get students to work harder in high school and yield significant gains in the percentage of high school graduates who go on to college.

"Merit-aid programs like Georgia's HOPE scholarships can distort students' incentives, scholars say," by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6,

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Consequences-intended and not-of merit scholarships for college

Dems to President: Show us the money!

January 9, 2003

While the President and First Lady celebrated the first anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act at the White House with school principals and superintendents, education leaders, and members of Congress on Wednesday, critics of the law gripe that it will be impossible for states and districts to comply unless the path is greased with $7.7 billion in additional federal education funds. Forty-two Democratic senators have sent a letter to President Bush complaining that NCLB will fail without that sort of budget boost. Meanwhile, five states - Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio - have had their accountability plans approved by the Department of Education. All other states must submit preliminary plans by January 31, 2003. A survey released this week by Americans for Better Education found that 91 percent of Americans support the main goals of NCLB, and that two thirds believe that raising standards and accountability is more important than increasing funding to improve education.

"Education law reaches milestone amid discord," by Michael Fletcher, Washington Post, January 8, 2003

"President Bush celebrates one-year anniversary of No Child Left Behind Act," U.S. Department of Education press release

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Dems to President: Show us the money!

Is the teacher shortage over?

January 9, 2003

School districts across the country are having an easier time finding and keeping qualified teachers at the very time that shortages were expected to grow more severe. According to recent news reports, many teacher recruitment forums have been packed, which observers attribute to the downturn in the economy (which makes stable teaching jobs more attractive), a desire for meaningful work after September 11, and higher starting salaries in many districts. A new emphasis on recruiting and retention also seems to be paying off. Shortfalls continue of teachers for special ed, math, and science, and in inner cities and rural areas. "Quality Counts 2003," released by Education Week this week (and reviewed in next week's Gadfly) takes a close look at efforts across the 50 states to find qualified teachers, particularly in high-poverty areas.

"NY teacher shortfall no longer exists," Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, January 3, 2003

"Big teacher gap now filling in," by Mark Sappenfield, Christian Science Monitor, December 25, 2002

"Quality Counts 2003," Education Week, January 9, 2003

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The Cat in the Hat and the reading wars

January 9, 2003

Frustration with the books used in public schools to teach children how to read is nothing new. An article in The New Yorker recounts how an attack on primers in the 1955 best-seller Why Johnny Can't Read ultimately led to publication of The Cat in the Hat and other classics by Dr. Seuss. Not only were primers "horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers," charged Rudolf Flesch, the author of the 1955 attack, they were based on a flawed pedagogy: the idea that children learn words by memorizing them rather than sounding them out. After reading Flesch's book, an editor at Houghton Mifflin contacted Dr. Seuss and challenged him to write a story using only words that first-graders could recognize or sound out. The result was The Cat in the Hat, which eventually sold over 7.2 million copies and transformed the nature of children's books because it stood for the idea that reading ought to be taught by phonics, and language skills ought to be taught using illustrated storybooks rather than primers. "Cat People: What Dr. Seuss really taught us," by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2002

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The Cat in the Hat and the reading wars

Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools are Good For All Kids

Terry Ryan / January 9, 2003

Eileen Gale Kugler
2002

This book represents the plea of a mother and advocate (who also happens to be a communications specialist) to other parents, urging them to seek out "diverse schools" for their children. Kugler recommends this course of action based largely on her own experience raising two children who attended a large "diverse" high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. According to Kugler, "The academic and personal growth of my children was staggering in this school with students hailing from more than 85 countries, speaking more than 40 native languages." Kugler believes that similar experiences should become the norm for all kids. For children in wealthy suburbs (according to the 2000 Census, Fairfax's median household income is $91,000, the highest in America) of major metropolitan areas, that option may be real and appealing. I say this as a resident of Fairfax County and someone who values the diversity to be found in my neighborhood, the local schools, restaurants, business and cultural scene. Having grown up in a small Midwestern city, however, I know that such diversity is not the norm in much of America. That reality seems not to matter to Kugler, for whom attending a diverse school matters more than attending an effective school. The biggest problem with this book is what happens if you try and take Kugler's logic and apply it to policy. Should communities seek formulas for making schools "diverse," and then bus children across town

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Debunking the Middle-Class Myth: Why Diverse Schools are Good For All Kids

Defining "Highly Qualified Teachers": What Does "Scientifically-Based Research" Actually Tell Us?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 9, 2003

Linda Darling-Hammond and Peter Youngs
Education Researcher, December 2002

Secretary Paige certainly caused the hive to buzz when he issued his estimable July 2002 report on teacher quality. (You can read it at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf See also http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=54#802 for the Gadfly's comments on that report.) Its critique of traditional teacher preparation and certification struck hard at the conventional wisdom about boosting teacher quality - a project that has become more urgent in view of NCLB's requirement that every U.S. school child be taught by "highly qualified" teachers not later than 2006. The latest rejoinder was issued in the December issue of the American Education Research Association's Education Researcher by Stanford education professor (and unquenchable protector of the conventional wisdom) Linda Darling-Hammond, joined by Stanford post-doc Peter Youngs. They contend that Paige's conclusions rest on four erroneous arguments, which they seek to debunk in this essay. I don't find theirs a very convincing case - they rehash familiar evidence, much of it old, much of it ambiguous - although the AERA readership will likely lap it up. If you want to see for yourself, you can find it at http://www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol31_09/AERA310903.pdf.

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Defining "Highly Qualified Teachers": What Does "Scientifically-Based Research" Actually Tell Us?

From the Capital to the Classroom

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / January 9, 2003

Jack Jennings, Center on Education Policy
January 2003

Jack Jennings's Center on Education Policy is the source of this report, on the second year of NCLB, a useful service (underwritten by a quartet of foundations) that last month yielded this 240-page document. It does a respectable job of setting forth many relevant facts (as seen from the state education agency perspective) with the predictable amount of editorializing and rationalizing. Because most states responded to the project's survey, the report offers data not previously available. It has four main sections: general "perceptions" of NCLB; testing and accountability; public school choice and supplemental services; and teacher quality. A fifth chapter addresses lesser provisions (scientifically based research, Reading First, English language learners.) The headline version of all this is that states and districts are trying hard and want NCLB to succeed, but that it's painful and costly to implement correctly, mainly because of the huge number of schools being identified as "in need of improvement" (or "corrective action"). A particular grievance: the obligation to assess LEP and disabled youngsters on the same tests and hold them to the same standards is widely viewed as unrealistic. If this isn't dealt with in Washington, says Jennings, "There is a risk of losing the commitment of states and school districts to achieving the Act's goals." One bone to pick: in discussing why NCLB's public-school choice provisions are "rarely used," he fails to note the foot-dragging, resistance, and bureaucratic

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From the Capital to the Classroom

Strengthening Pennsylvania's Charter School Reform: Findings From the Statewide Evaluation and Discussion of Relevant Policy Issues

Eric Osberg / January 9, 2003

Gary Miron, Christopher Nelson, and John Risley
The Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University
October 2002

This report appraises charter schools in Pennsylvania five years along, seeking to gauge their impact and provide some recommendations for the future. It provides a wealth of information for people specifically interested in the Keystone State's 90 charter schools. Its value to everyone else is more limited. Regarding the educational performance of the schools, the authors note that, overall, charter pupils are "gaining ground" on traditional public school students (using PSSA scores, filtered for student background factors), though they voice concern that some schools showed great gains while others great losses. They argue that the Commonwealth's accountability arrangements for its charter schools are not yet adequate: to date, just a quarter of them have even been audited. The report also raises some interesting questions that it does not answer. For example, while teacher and parent satisfaction levels in charters are high, are they higher than in conventional public schools? In private schools? Though they find that some charter-style innovations are beginning to appear in public schools, are those public schools improving? Given the great variation in charter school performance, what characteristics do the best ones share? And what, if anything, can be done to develop charter schools in the 73% of Pennsylvania counties that still have none? To access this study, go to http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr.

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Strengthening Pennsylvania's Charter School Reform: Findings From the Statewide Evaluation and Discussion of Relevant Policy Issues