Four Wars

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 19, 2003

No, this is not about Iraq but about four raging education battles, three in Washington and one in academe, all with mega policy implications. On the surface, each looks like a conflict between "keep it the way it is even though it isn't working" and "change it even though that'll be disruptive." Not far below is a tussle over - what else? - jobs, power, money, influence, and legitimacy.

1. Teaching Pre-schoolers

Head Start has become the subject of intense controversy on Capitol Hill as the Bush administration and some Congressmen move to reform this iconic four-decade old pre-school program in two ways. One is to focus it more explicitly on school-readiness, i.e. make it more academic and cognitive. The other is to give states greater say over it while also holding them more accountable for its results.

The rationale for greater academic oomph is clear: many poor kids are behind the academic eight ball before they reach kindergarten and Head Start is the main federal program aimed at that urgent problem. Those who resist this change prefer the program's traditional focus on "child development." Just under the surface, however, is the fact that thousands of Head Start staffers aren't qualified to teach a more substantive curriculum and would either have to get themselves retrained and qualified (the House bill would eventually require at least a college degree) or risk losing their jobs.

The administration's rationale for greater state control is murkier, and

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Four Wars

A grand bargain on teacher pay?

June 19, 2003

Matthew Miller thinks he's got the answer to teacher shortages in America's toughest schools - and maybe he does, since he's brought to the table both teacher union president Sandra Feldman and Fordham president Chester Finn. In the July 2003 Atlantic Monthly, Miller proposes a deal: the federal government would commit $30 billion per year to raise the salaries of teachers in the nation's toughest schools by 50 percent. In return, these teachers would agree to abandon lockstep pay scales and make it easier to fire incompetent teachers. Miller calls it "Title I for Teachers," and AFT head Feldman - among other union leaders - said she could sign on. To gauge the reaction of reformers, Miller approached the Gadfly's own Finn, who responded with another version that would two-track the compensation system: higher pay for teachers who are willing to give up some job security but not for those unwilling to take that risk. The remaining sticking point: how to measure teacher performance? By increases in student achievement? The judgment of principals and peers? Some sort of blended approach? There are, of course, myriad details to be worked out - and political will to be mustered - before any such plan is rendered plausible. But it's a start.

"A new deal for teachers," by Matthew Miller, Atlantic Monthly, July 2003 (not available online)

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A grand bargain on teacher pay?

Accountability rollback in CA

June 19, 2003

Last month a study predicted that 20 percent of California's class of 2004 may fail the state's high school exit exam due to inadequate preparation. (This despite the fact that students have eight chances to pass it; almost half have already done so.) In response, the state's schools chief has cancelled the July administration of the test and is recommending that the state board of education delay until 2006 the requirement making passage of the test a pre-requisite for graduation. Thus our largest state joins the shameful bandwagon of those that adopt standards (often none too ambitious to start with) and tests and consequences but then quietly back away when the consequences begin to inconvenience people. [See "Resist urge to "refine" graduation testing," ADD LINK FROM LAST WEEK'S EDITORIAL.] That it's possible to resist these pressures is evident in a few states such as Massachusetts and Virginia. Will California's state board also have the backbone to stick with standards-based education?

"Schools chief cancels July test," by Erika Chavez and Bill Lindelof, Sacramento Bee, June 14, 2003

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Accountability rollback in CA

Are charter changes coming to CA?

June 19, 2003

Two bills before the California legislature would, if enacted, dramatically improve the prospects of the charter school movement in that state. AB 1137, which passed the Assembly on June 5 and is now before a Senate committee, requires charter authorizers to ensure that the schools they oversee comply with specified reporting requirements and meet at least one of several objective academic performance criteria to receive a charter renewal. AB 1464, currently stalled in the Assembly, would extend charter-authorizing power to colleges and universities, mayors and, in some cases, nonprofit organizations. [To see Gadfly's earlier coverage of this bill, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=22#117.] These two bills tackle what the Fordham Foundation's recent evaluation of state charter authorizers ["Charter School Authorizing: Are States Making the Grade?" at found to be two of the most troublesome obstacles to successful charter schools in California: relying on local school districts for authorizing, despite their aversion to charter schools; and accountability provisions for charters that are overly subjective and ambiguous.

California AB 1137

California AB 1464

"Crucial legislation: charter schools, AB 1137," editorial, San Jose Mercury News, June 15, 2003

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Are charter changes coming to CA?

Is history, history?

June 19, 2003

An unintended consequence of the No Child Left Behind Act is that, due to the pressure to boost pupil achievement in reading, math, and science (the subjects tested under the federal law), schools are neglecting other valuable subjects, not least of which are history, civics, and geography - aka "social studies." Maryland, for example, no longer mandates assessments in history and social studies in elementary and middle schools nor does it include these subjects in statewide curriculum standards. Will NCLB lead to the end of history? It shouldn't. It only sets minimum requirements for receiving federal aid. Districts and states are supposed to augment these.

"There's wisdom in teaching knowledge with reading," by Karin Chenoweth, The Washington Post, June 5, 2003

"History and social studies education in Maryland, a cause for concern," by Margaret R. Burke, Ph.D., April 22, 2003

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Is history, history?

Teach for America caught in AmeriCorps cuts

June 19, 2003

This week, the national service program AmeriCorps announced that it has been forced to make drastic cuts in its grant programs, due to past-year overruns and a continuing impasse on how it accounts for the education awards earned by members. (Corps members receive a stipend and an award of up to $4,725 that can be used to pay for college or to pay back student loans, in exchange for service through a nonprofit organization.) After October 1, enrollments could plummet as low as 12,000, from the 50,000 originally projected by AmeriCorps officials. A number of education organizations would be hit hard, including literacy programs for low-income, rural, and tribal communities; after-school programs; and youth mentoring groups. Among them is Teach for America (TFA), which will place 3,200 college graduates in elementary and secondary classrooms this fall. Since TFA launched in 1990, all 9,000 participants have received AmeriCorps education awards, which many use to pay for further coursework to become certified. TFA official Kevin Huffman told the Gadfly that the program is bracing itself for the unprecedented situation of being unable to offer members an education award - and that TFA's board is considering costly alternatives, including covering the awards through private donations. "This is potentially pretty devastating," said Huffman. "These members made a commitment and they may well find themselves without the education benefit they expected when they signed up."

"AmeriCorps announces major cuts," by Brian Faler, Washington Post, June

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High School Issue Papers: For Youth and Adult Groups Organizing to Transform High School Education in the United States

Kathleen Porter-Magee / June 19, 2003

In an effort to refocus attention on high schools - "the weakest link in a troubled education system" - the reform group Research for Democracy compiled this series of short essays on high school reform. Though their recommendations and research are not earth shattering, they underscore the need for higher standards and increased accountability for student achievement and teacher quality. In addition, the report helps focus attention on the importance of setting clear, consistent standards for student and teacher behavior and discipline. Finally, the essays provide a list of useful resources for parents, teachers, and community leaders seeking to move the ball forward on high school reform. You can download the entire report or individual essays at http://www.temple.edu/cpp/hs_issue_papers.htm.

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High School Issue Papers: For Youth and Adult Groups Organizing to Transform High School Education in the United States

Performance-Driven Budgeting: The Example of New York City's Schools

Eric Osberg / June 19, 2003

Dorothy Siegel, ERIC Digest 168
May 2003

This digest offers a quick overview of research supporting school-based management practices, based mainly on the author's study of former chancellor Rudy Crew's Performance Driven Budgeting (PDB) initiative in New York City (see http://www.nyu.edu/iesp/publications/pdb/PDB_final_rpt.pdffor that study). Following experiments in Edmonton and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, New York in 1997 instituted a pilot of PDB in 61 schools. They were given greater autonomy over their budgets and instructional plans, with the aim of aligning the two to boost student achievement. It seems to have helped. Siegel finds a "small, but statistically significant, increase in student academic outcomes" for PDB schools. That's striking when you recall that PDB did not give schools full control over staffing decisions. Imagine what might happen if districts went allowed principals to make their own personnel decisions. Of course, New York has since moved in the opposite direction - toward greater centralization - and the PDB experiment has ended. But these results should serve as evidence that empowering school leaders is one good route to educational improvement. To read the digest, visit http://eric.uoregon.edu/publications/digests/digest168.html.

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Performance-Driven Budgeting: The Example of New York City's Schools

Research Perspectives on School Reform: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 19, 2003

Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
March 2003

I suppose we will forever see fresh efforts to evaluate and learn from--and spin--the effects of the "Annenberg Challenge," the multifaceted efforts undertaken after 1993 to reform public education with the help of Ambassador Walter Annenberg's munificent half-billion dollar gift. The latest such effort is this 130-page collection of seven studies, compiled and published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. (Given its source, you can safely assume it isn't going to be super-critical!) This is a topic we have addressed before, both in the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's own three-city appraisal [http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=41] and in reporting on prior efforts by the Annenberg folks to reflect on their experiences. [for Gadfly's coverage, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=22.] The central difficulty in evaluating the Annenberg Challenge is that it took so many different forms. Just about all they had in common was their insistence on changing the public-school system itself (rather than, say, competing with it or creating alternatives to it) and their reliance on "intermediary organizations" for this purpose. This means the specific strategies employed in one city differed greatly from those in the next city, making it impossible to generalize. This volume seeks to adduce lessons from half a dozen sites (Boston, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami) plus an arts-based strategy. Think of it as a collection of case studies by sympathetic but often perceptive participant/observers.

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Research Perspectives on School Reform: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge

Teaching Children to Read: The Fragile Links Between Science and Federal Education Policy

Kathleen Porter-Magee / June 19, 2003

Gregory Camilli and others, National Institute for Early Education

The "reading wars" continue, but at an ever more technical level. This new report (published online as part of the "Education Policy Analysis Archives") was written by Gregory Camilli and colleagues at the National Institute for Early Education Research. This is a deeply technical paper, using the evaluation method known as "meta-analysis," which seeks to re-examine the studies that the National Reading Panel (NRP) relied upon in its influential report three years ago. (Camilli & Co. ended up discarding one of those studies and adding a few more.) Most readers (myself included) will find it heavy going. Notwithstanding the misleading title given this piece by EPAA custodians, the basic conclusion is that the National Reading Panel was essentially correct when it said "systematic phonics" is an important element of early reading instruction but (says Camilli and team) it's considerably more powerful when used in conjunction with individual tutoring and what are ambiguously termed "language activities." (Those appear to be the sorts of things long favored by "whole language" advocates.) In the end, this paper seems to me to strengthen the reading consensus that is proving to be one of the most robust findings of education research: phonics is very important for nearly every child in learning to read, but a diet of pure phonics would leave anybody malnourished. Indeed, veteran educators often point out that phonics, properly taught, gets internalized and automated

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Teaching Children to Read: The Fragile Links Between Science and Federal Education Policy

The Performance of California Charter Schools

Kathleen Porter-Magee / June 19, 2003

Margaret E. Raymond, CREDO, Hoover Institution at Stanford University
May 2003

Though California has had charter schools for almost a decade, little research has examined their impact on student achievement. This new report from Stanford's Center for Research on Educational Outcomes attempts to fill that void by comparing charter schools and traditional public schools on two dimensions. The first is a school's Academic Performance Index (API), a weighted average of scores earned by students on standardized exams in grades 3-11. The second is gain scores: average student achievement increases from one year to the next. The bottom line is that charter students are performing slightly below students as a whole but are ahead in year-to-year gains. Raymond found that, when the average API for charter schools was compared against the average API for all traditional public schools (including districts with high performing public schools and no charters, which often don't have students who are demographically comparable to districts with charters), the charters' API is slightly lower though not statistically significant. When it comes to gain scores, though, Raymond found that charter high schools show statistically significant year-to-year gains compared to their public school counterparts (elementary schools also show greater year-to-year gains, though these are not statistically significant). As Raymond notes, the pool of charters includes many new schools that are "experiencing all the disruption of starting a new enterprise." So the fact that they are doing as well or better than their

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The Performance of California Charter Schools