Are unions accountable, too?

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

"If men were angels," Madison wrote in Federalist #51, "no government would be necessary."

Thus too with schools and other education institutions. If children were angels, nobody would need to check on whether they did their homework or test them to see whether they learned the week's spelling words. If educators were angels, they would spontaneously leave no child behind and we wouldn't need elaborate mechanisms to hold them and their schools "accountable" for performance.

"Accountability" means the arrangements by which others can determine whether we're doing what angels would do unbidden—and the means by which those others can influence us to become more angel-like. Its two vital ingredients are not angelic wings, however, but, transparency and intervention (or its equivalent: incentives, sanctions, and rewards whose influence is similar to intervention).

Transparency and intervention (and its avoidance) occur throughout our lives. Cars have speedometers and police have radar—and the ability to write tickets—to keep us accountable to speed limits. The physician has a scale. A device beeps if you take an item from the store that you didn't pay for. The monthly bank statement asks to be reconciled with one's checkbook. Dinner guests smile or frown after taking a bite of the meal you've cooked. The remote lets you "punish" a bad television show by opting for another. (If every program were produced by angels, who would need options?) The auditor checks the company treasurer's books and reports his findings to shareholders and

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Are unions accountable, too?

New college try

October 9, 2003

Standardized tests may be under attack in America but they turn out to be a godsend for Russian parents. That nation's college entrance exams, relics of the Communist era, are specific to each university and usually involve professors drilling applicants in an oral exam. The system is rife with corruption, with professors charging fat sums to serve as "tutors" who give students the exact questions they will face, or simply taking outright bribes for letting students pass. Those who don't pay face a barrage of unanswerable questions and have little chance of admittance, while those who can't afford the bribes are often forced to pay in other ways. (One woman went to work for free at the university her daughter studied at, a kind of latter-day indentured servitude that many American parents can at least sympathize with.) Now a new standardized entrance test, the Unified State Exam, is leveling the playing field and tamping down the corruption of Russian college entry.

"Admissions fee," by Masha Gessen, The New Republic, October 13, 2003 (subscription required)

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New college try

Holding kids back gets them ahead

October 9, 2003

Four years ago in two St. Clair County, Michigan school districts, officials started a highly controversial new accountability program whereby students who were not reading at grade level at the end of third grade would be held back.  Critics of retention blasted the program, citing dropout statistics that show that students who are held back are more likely to drop out than students who are pushed along through social promotion.  The two district superintendents stood their ground, however, despite cries from individual schools, teachers, principals and parents asking to delay the consequences of the program to another year.  "Why should we wait?" Superintendent Dennis Guiser said. "If what we're doing is the right thing, why not affect this year's third-graders?"  Besides, the superintendents maintained, there is "other data [that] shows that kids who are not on grade level in reading by the end of third grade are less likely to graduate."  Turns out the commitment to the program was exactly what the students of St. Clair County needed.  In both districts, "83 percent of fourth-graders met the state's expectations in reading, up from 55 percent in Algonac Community Schools and 65 percent in Yale Public Schools in 1999. They also came in ahead of the state average, 75 percent." 

"MEAP success: Holding kids back seems to pay off," by Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki,
Detroit Free Press, October 8, 2003

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Holding kids back gets them ahead

Children, seen and heard

October 9, 2003

In August, the Marysville, Washington school superintendent refused to comply with 30 union demands, including across-the-board raises that would have cost the district $14 million. And so, on September 1st - the first day of school, chosen to cause maximum chaos - Marysville teachers began what is about to become the longest strike in the state's history. It's gone on so long that even children are fed up with their unexpected vacation, especially seniors who saw college application deadlines looming and graduation slipping into late summer. So, a group of high-school students requested that the teachers go back to work. Request denied. The resourceful students took matters into their own hands and held an all-night sit-in to protest the strike, to no avail. They begged the governor to intervene. He wouldn't. Finally, they enlisted the help of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which helped the kids call a press conference to dramatize their cause. The Washington Education Association responded by calling EFF "an evil band of zealots." The EFF has decided to live up to the name, so they "covered up [their] horns," as spokeswoman Marsha Richards put it, and distributed information about district rules and school funding to parents, teachers, and students. As it turns out, the strike is actually illegal under state law, but the Marysville superintendent has yet to go to court to enforce the no-strike provision, though she has indicated that "perhaps, one of these days" she might. A group of parents has beaten her to

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Children, seen and heard

Sad state of service

October 9, 2003

The latest issue of National Review contains a special section on education, featuring Victor Davis Hanson (a contributor to Fordham's recent publication Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know) on the Iraq War and college campuses. But our attention was caught by Princeton student Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky's piece on the hypocrisy of student service. As competition for spots in elite colleges becomes fierce - and post-college prospects grow more straitened - many students are turning to volunteer service to differentiate themselves from the pack. Problem is, this service has now become just one more box to check off on the application, which lends a workaday attitude to what ought to be spontaneous service to one's fellow men. We guess we'll take service-for-reward over no service at all, but in San Diego the unions don't want either. The local paper recently reported that parents who tried to organize community cleanups of weed-ridden schools in response to cuts in maintenance budgets were turned away after unions complained that volunteers were displacing union workers. "What happens when the district gets in better financial shape? Why rehire the landscape crews when the work is being done free? If people really want to help, they should be writing their elected officials about the budget," said a union official.

"Special education section," National Review, October 13, 2003,

"Schools caught between weedy yards and union jobs," by Maureen Magee, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 5,

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Sad state of service

Noticias excitantes para la reforma de educacion

October 9, 2003

We welcome a new player on the education-choice team, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, or Hispanic CREO. The group was launched today at the National Press Club, with a follow-up conference in Washington and the release of a new study on Hispanic students and choice, authored by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute. (We'll have more to say on the study in a future issue.) Hispanic CREO will concentrate its initial efforts in four states - Colorado, Texas, New Jersey, and Florida - and will seek to build grassroots support for all forms of choice, including charter schools and vouchers.

Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (CREO),

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Noticias excitantes para la reforma de educacion

Keeping Count and Losing Count: Calculating Graduation Rates for all Students Under NCLB Accountability

Eric Osberg / October 9, 2003

Christopher B. Swanson, Education Policy Center, The Urban Institute
August 2003

This clear and concise report, initially presented at a conference sponsored by the Harvard Civil Rights Project (and one of the few interesting reports to emerge from that ill-starred venture), offers a method for calculating graduation rates that states may find useful now that NCLB requires them to include such measures in their accountability plans. Calculating a graduation rate may seem simple, but is actually fraught with difficulty. Thus the "conventional wisdom" from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) - that U.S. graduation rates hover between 85 and 90 percent - is deeply misleading. Superior methods show that the true rate is, sadly, closer to two-thirds. Here, Swanson presents one of these methods, which he developed, and recaps the second, developed earlier by Manhattan's Jay Greene. [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=27#153] Both methods consider how many students actually graduate; NCES, on the other hand, relies on drop-out rates, which are notoriously flawed. This is no mere academic quarrel. States need a sound methodology to meet the spirit of NCLB, but unfortunately too many states are instead opting for the NCES approach, which meets the barest letter of the law but surely violates its intent. [For each state's plans see Swanson's separate NCLB Implementation Report] Both Swanson's and Greene's methods rely on more readily available data. Greene's may be slightly more accurate while Swanson's is easier to calculate, but both represent a

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Keeping Count and Losing Count: Calculating Graduation Rates for all Students Under NCLB Accountability

Improving Teaching and Learning by Improving School Leadership

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

Christopher Mazzeo, National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices
September 2003.

This constructive ten-pager discusses what states can do to strengthen the leadership (principals, mainly) of their public schools. It tackles three big issues - licensure, preparation, and professional development - and offers valuable insights and sage advice on all three. This includes removing "barriers for talented individuals to enter the profession," establishing "alternative principal preparation programs," and tailoring the professional development of school leaders to the expectations of NCLB. You can find it online here. 

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Improving Teaching and Learning by Improving School Leadership

Determinants of Student Achievement: New Evidence from San Diego

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

Julian R. Betts and PPIC's Andrew C. Zau and Lorien A. Rice, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)
2003

This short book from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) provides a close analysis of data from San Diego and seeks to illumine equalities and inequalities in school resources; trends in pupil achievement and achievement gaps; and, especially, which factors in school and classroom have the most influence on changes in student performance. On the first point, the authors found that the main resource discrepancy between affluent and non-affluent elementary schools in San Diego is teacher experience and preparation. On the second point, they unearthed "shocking" achievement gaps in all the usual directions - but also found nearly all of those gaps narrowing between 1998 and 2000. (That's before the onset of the much-publicized "Blueprint for Student Success" reform strategy of Alan Bersin and Tony Alvarado.) What turns out to influence student achievement from school to school and year to year? There's much technical stuff here, though Betts & Co. do an exceptionally nice job of making it accessible to ordinary mortals. It turns out - no big surprise - that attending school actually matters, i.e. kids who are absent a lot learn less. Peer group matters, too, but more at the grade level than the classroom level: the higher achieving a child's grade-mates, the better he/she is apt to do. Class size matters some, although only in reading in the early

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Determinants of Student Achievement: New Evidence from San Diego

Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities

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

YMCA, Dartmouth Medical School and the Institute for American Values
2003

 It's never been easy to get your mind around what James Coleman called "social capital" and what the Commission on Children at Risk, in this provocative new report, terms "connectedness." It says the deteriorating mental and behavioral health of U.S. children is a real problem but we're barking up the wrong tree when we seek to solve it primarily through medication, therapy, and special programs for "at-risk" children. What's needed instead - or in addition - say the 33 members of this commission (a joint venture of the YMCA, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values), is greater attention to the "broad environmental conditions that are contributing to growing numbers of suffering children." "In large measure," they find, "what's causing this crisis of American childhood is a lack of . . . close connections to other people and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning." Their antidote: children should live in "authoritative communities." Many pages are devoted to setting forth the essential characteristics of such communities, which include: establishing "clear limits and expectations," transmitting to community members "a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person," and encouraging "spiritual and religious development." It's a bit like reinventing "civil society" at the community level and urging that we raise our children within that society. Of particular merit is the scientific evidence undergirding the commission's diagnosis and

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Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities

Citizenship: A Challenge for All Generations

Carolyn Conner / October 9, 2003

Karl T. Kurtz, Alan Rosenthal, and Cliff Zukin, National Conference of State Legislatures
September 2003

This report publishes the results of a survey conducted by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Center for Civic Education, and Indiana University's Center on Congress. The survey focused on civic education and the awareness of the American public, with questions concerning citizen's political knowledge as well as levels of participation and involvement in politics and community. By comparing the results of different generations, it shows a significant generation gap in civic knowledge. There is a clear decline in understanding and civic participation among our nation's youth - dubbed "DotNets," aged 15-26, - which arguably contributes to decreased engagement in local, state, or national politics. Only 47 percent of DotNets vote, compared to 77 percent of older generations. Just 48 percent knew the political party of their current governor and only 40 percent knew which party controlled Congress. Interestingly, DotNets who had taken civics classes were more than twice as likely to follow politics. This report is informative and helpful to those designing civics programs for young people. Check it out at http://www.ncsl.org/public/trust/citizenship.pdf.

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Citizenship: A Challenge for All Generations