Democracy Tweed style

Andrew Wolf / April 29, 2004

The next step in New York City's education "reform" will be perhaps the least democratic school board election ever held. In this unique election, only parents of currently enrolled public school students are eligible to serve and only a handful of parent "leaders" will be allowed to vote.

The "Community District Education Councils" (CDECs) to emerge from this odd process result from a legal settlement between Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Klein, and New York State legislative leaders last spring. Under that arrangement, the CDECs replace elected community school boards, themselves created in the turmoil of the late 1960s to "reform" what was then perceived as an overly-centralized system.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, most New Yorkers agree that the decentralization effort went too far. But in this early stage of the current reform effort, a queasy feeling is developing that the pendulum may have swung back too far in the opposite direction.

The CDECs will have little power, though they'll have input on a number of issues including zoning and the evaluation of the city's ten Regional Superintendents and 113 Local Instructional Superintendents. But all real decisions rest with Tweed (as Joel Klein's operation is now termed, after the old courthouse in which its headquarters reside). For Klein and the mayor, the CDECs give the illusion of parent and community involvement in the autocratic decision-making process that has quickly evolved since Bloomberg assumed control.

The CDEC electoral process would shame the old Soviet

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Democracy Tweed style

Scoring points on Columbine

April 29, 2004

As we know, K-12 education is beset by snake oil and flim-flam. Usually, we don't bother to comment, on grounds that life is too short, that it's best not to draw attention to nonsense, that it's bad for our digestions, etc.

But sometimes, there crops up an example of meretriciousness so obnoxious we must take note. Thus it is with "High Test Scores? Look at Columbine," by Margaret McKenna, the president of Lesley University in Massachusetts, a commentary originally published in the Washington Post and syndicated nationally by the Post newswire.

As you may recall, April 25th was the fifth anniversary of the worst school shooting in U.S. history. Half a decade later, as Slate magazine has admirably demonstrated (see http://politics.slate.msn.com/id/2099203), we now know that many of the conclusions the press and public jumped to about why Columbine happened, and how to prevent it from recurring, were simply false. As FBI investigators have concluded, there was no "Trench Coat Mafia," there was no dark history of abuse by jocks and preps, there was no sick social structure at Columbine High that drove Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to kill. In fact, while Klebold was a sad and troubled loner under the sway of a stronger personality, Harris, we now know, was a textbook psychopath, drunk with a sense of his own grandeur. He had contempt for the lower beings around him and expressed pleasure at the thought of their suffering

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Scoring points on Columbine

Panel says no to Yecke

April 29, 2004

In Minnesota, a state Senate committee voted yesterday along party lines to reject the nomination of Cheri Yecke to be state superintendent. Her apparent sin? Being too "controversial," which is code for getting useful things done. And get things done she has, including dumping the state's atrocious Profile of Learning standards and shepherding a crackerjack set of social studies standards into being. Though Governor Tim Pawlenty has promised a vigorous fight before the full Senate, state Democrats seem determined to deprive the people of Minnesota of the services of a nationally recognized middle school and gifted education expert, experienced policy maker, and passionate advocate for reform. If they succeed, the loss will be not just theirs but that of every student in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

"Senate panel votes against Yecke," by Norman Draper, Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 29, 2004

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Panel says no to Yecke

Rocky Mountain high-er education

April 29, 2004

The Colorado legislature has passed, and Governor Bill Owens is expected to sign, a bill creating a voucher program for higher education in that state. The new program will give Colorado students $2,400 to spend on up to 140 credit hours at state colleges and universities. It will also loosen some of the arcane?and ruinous?funding regulations that Colorado colleges labor under. Critics, of course, vow a court challenge, with one state senator muttering darkly about "hidden agendas." (An aside: nationwide, voucher opponents are beginning to sound like Howard Hughes in his tissue-box-shoes phase, no?) To us, it sounds like a solid step toward rationalizing an increasingly burdensome higher education funding system. Let's hope other states take notice.

"Voucher bill passes," by Peggy Lowe, Rocky Mountain News, April 28, 2004

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Rocky Mountain high-er education

NCLB bringing change to the windy city?

April 29, 2004

The Sun-Times reports that Chicago students who used the school-choice provision of No Child Left Behind to transfer from weak to stronger schools showed gains in reading and math. Further, the transfers didn't harm either the schools they left or the schools they entered, according to a study performed by the Chicago Board of Education at the paper's request. More such studies are needed in other cities, and scholars have some quibbles with this one, but the news is certainly welcome for choice and NCLB supporters - in particular, for those who wished NCLB contained more choice and that fewer bureaucratic and capacity hurdles confronted kids hoping to exercise it. Chicago is not without blame on the latter point, having allowed just 2,500 of its 120,000 eligible students to transfer (this figure will drop to 457 students in the coming school year). One might hope this news would cause the school system to widen the transfer option, but Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan says otherwise: "We refused to overwhelm schools. That's why this worked well." Maybe. But we suspect that the threshold for "overwhelming" a district of 400,000 students is a bit higher than 457.

"Early results on 'No Child': progress," by Rosalind Rossi, Chicago Sun-Times, April 25, 2004

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NCLB bringing change to the windy city?

This is your brain on phonics&

April 29, 2004

The Wall Street Journal this week highlighted a new study (by acclaimed reading expert Sally Shaywitz) published in the journal Biological Psychiatry that used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain activity of poor readers and gauge the brain wave effects of an intensive phonics program. The study provides biological evidence that with the right type of intervention program, poor readers can show improvement by, literally, strengthening the functioning of the relevant portions of their brains. The intensive (105 tutoring hours) phonics-based approach yielded a marked improvement in children's reading accuracy and fluency and continued to be effective long after the tutoring sessions were through. Imaging done a year after the program's conclusion showed that the brain activity of the poor readers did not lapse back to pre-program levels but maintained the level/type of activity that developed over the course of the reading sessions. Standard school-level interventions (special education and tutoring) did not have the same positive effect (either long or short-term) on the brains of poor readers. This suggests that an intense approach emphasizing phonics helps re-train the brains of poor readers to function more like those of good readers.

"Poor readers, given new lessons, show changes in brain activity," by Christopher Windham, Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2004 (subscription required)

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This is your brain on phonics&

The Nation shifts paradigms

April 29, 2004

Writing in The Nation, Stanford professor Claude Steele makes a number of points about the "ability paradigm," his term for the testing system that assesses the academic readiness and achievement of individual students, guides placement decisions (such as whether a student will go on to the next grade level or a competitive college), and guides political and social decisions as to how educational resources will be allocated. Steele's article focuses on how this "paradigm" affects minorities, especially African-Americans. It may surprise readers that we agree with many of his recommendations, though he is far more skeptical about the usefulness of testing than we. But you'll find no disagreement here that "ability" ought to be less important than "achievement" (or, as Steele prefers, "skill level") in making decisions about placement. We agree that remedial placements ought not become "life sentences" for minority youths. And we definitely agree that all students ought to take a high-quality, demanding curriculum. We're a little unclear on what Steele means when he talks of "additional metrics [to assess] such signs of student readiness as motivation and desire, breadth of life experience, degree of experience in the relevant domain, work discipline, maturity, etc.," since none of these desirable attributes quite substitutes for actually knowing the material. But overall, there is much sense in this article, despite its improbable venue.

"Not just a test," by Claude Steele, The Nation, May 3, 2004

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The Nation shifts paradigms

The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 29, 2004

Robert Perkins, Brian Kleiner, Stephen Roey, and Janis Brown, Westat and National Center for Education Statistics
April 2004

This whopper from the National Center for Education Statistics recounts changes in high-school course-taking patterns during the 1990s, based on transcript studies conducted in connection with NAEP. (You'll be able to make earlier comparisons - back to 1982 - with the help of a forthcoming "tabulations report" from NCES.) Sounds dry, yes, but it's full of important and somewhat encouraging data regarding the classes that high school students take before graduating, significant increases in AP and IB course-taking during that decade, intersections between course-taking and grades, and NAEP scores related to course-taking. To whet your appetite, here are three findings:

• The average number of course credits earned in "core" academic subjects by U.S. high-school graduates rose from 13.7 to 15 during the 1990's.
• Those who took AP and/or IB math/science courses also earned better grades (average of 3.6) than those who didn't (2.9), though everybody's GPA rose (from an average of 2.7 to 2.9).
• Private school graduates do better on NAEP than their public-school peers, but not hugely better. In 2000, the former earned an average NAEP "scale score" in math of 318 (of possible 500) while the latter averaged 300.

There are tons more where these came from. Check it out at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2004455.

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The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement

School Choice and School Competition: Evidence from the United States

Eric Osberg / April 29, 2004

Caroline M. Hoxby
2003

Hoxby presents a compelling report on the impact of three choice programs - Milwaukee's vouchers, and Michigan and Arizona's charter schools - on school productivity and student achievement. She limits her study to these three because they are the only choice programs that meet her strict criteria for competition effects - that is (in addition to offering sufficient data), they introduce true competition by allowing a substantial amount of money to follow the student; allow for changes in the number of schools (i.e. a "supply effect"); and do not place the choice program under the supervision of the schools with which it competes. She finds that schools in these three locales that faced competition did improve their productivity (test scores divided by per pupil spending). This remained true when controlling for a host of factors, including pre-existing trends and "creaming" (which wasn't actually a factor). The lay reader will also be interested in some of Hoxby's general observations - for example, that school productivity in the United States has declined some 50 percent since 1970, even after controlling for differences in students and changes in teacher salaries. She also comments on the recent controversy regarding Peterson's analysis of the New York City voucher program, in which he found positive results for black students - only to have Krueger and Zhu note flaws in the analysis. Hoxby suggests that those two fished for the results they wanted by "arbitrarily"

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School Choice and School Competition: Evidence from the United States

Adam Smith Institute

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 29, 2004

As its name suggests, this is a free-market research institute, based in London, that includes a strong education-policy program and has issued a number of provocative papers and reports by the likes of James Tooley and Chris Woodhead. Though (understandably) UK-oriented, much of what it has to say has broader applicability, so you may want to become acquainted. To meet the Institute, check out http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/theasi.htm. To find out about the "Better Education Project", go to http://www.adamsmith.org/cissues/education/project.htm. And for a list of the Institute's education publications, check out http://www.adamsmith.org/policy/publications/education-pub.htm#jump8.

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Adam Smith Institute