Grassroots resistance to NCLB

Phyllis McClure / March 18, 2004

In this space, Michael Kirst recently provided a useful commentary comparing the time it took to implement the original Title I to the present controversies over implementing the No Child Left Behind act. (To glimpse NCLB's future, look to the past, January 8, 2004) However, he was unable to explain why this reauthorization of Title I, unlike any in the program's long history, has engendered such grassroots resistance. At the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. from 1969 to 1993, I played an active role as an advocate for enforcing the original Title I and later as a strong supporter of reforming the program. In 1969, I co-authored the report, Title I: Is It Helping Poor Children?, that led to the first reforms of the program. Having participated in much of that history, I offer my own explanation for the unprecedented opposition to the current law.

NCLB has grabbed the education community's attention like no previous ESEA reauthorization. It has really upset the status quo in state and local offices and has shaken the complacency of educators and parents about their schools' performance. For the first time, district and school officials are actually being required to take serious and urgent action in return for federal funds. Title I has been around so long that it has come to be seen as an entitlement - a part of the basic foundation program in school districts. In its longevity, Title I

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Grassroots resistance to NCLB

Redefining "highly qualified teachers" . . . again

March 18, 2004

Education Secretary Rod Paige announced this week that the Department of Education will relax NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" requirements. Critics contend that the move is a "tactical retreat" designed to quell criticism of the law, which has been growing stronger as state lawmakers across the political spectrum threaten to eschew Title 1 dollars to avoid having to comply with NCLB's mandates. Paige insists, however, that the new policies are simply an attempt to "offer common-sense solutions that will help states and districts get the best teachers in front of the most needy students as soon as possible." The changes include: offering teachers in rural areas who are highly qualified in one subject three additional years to become highly qualified in additional subjects they teach; giving newly hired teachers three years to demonstrate qualification; and allowing states to use their own certification standards to determine competence for teachers who cover more than one field. While many groups - notably the NEA - have welcomed the changes as evidence that "the debate is no longer on whether NCLB and its implementation is flawed and needs to be fixed, but on what needs to be fixed," Ross Weiner of the Education Trust predicts that allowing such "flexibility" will give states "an invitation to define their problems away, instead of a call to tackle them head-on." These rules, he says, "extend a pattern of disowning and diminishing the teacher quality provisions in the law,

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Redefining "highly qualified teachers" . . . again

Bad effects of big time sports

March 18, 2004

It's March Madness time, and not even Gadfly is immune to the pleasures of a couple of weeks of serious college basketball. (We're taking Duke, with a revived Maryland as the potential sleeper, though Stanford remains the sentimental favorite of a few bleeding hearts in the office.) But we're not alone in one nagging worry: that high-stakes college sports have a tremendously bad effect on higher education. Gregg Easterbrook offers a deeply disturbing rundown of the graduation rates of major college basketball programs on his blog for The New Republic. Most major college basketball programs - the 25 or 30 programs with even an outside shot at the NCAA title - have such appalling graduation rates, especially for black scholarship recipients, that they have actually ceased to report such numbers (on highly specious privacy grounds, to be sure). Even otherwise stringent schools (such as Duke) graduate basketball scholarship recipients at half or less the rate of other students. And when athletes do graduate, their degrees are frequently shams, as demonstrated by the recent scandal over an absurdly easy final exam administered by assistant coach Jim Harrick, Jr. to a physical education class favored by scholarship recipients at the University of Georgia. (Question 5: How many halves are in a college basketball game?) Though today the NCAA has promised to crack down on programs with abysmal graduation rates, it's clear that high-stakes athletics has a deeply compromising effect on academics at

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Bad effects of big time sports

Charter sponsorship change pushed in three states

The push is on to open up the job of authorizing charter schools to more entities. (See Fordham's report on charter school authorizing, which advocated just such a move, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=67). So far, however, success is rare. We reported a few weeks ago about a bill in Colorado to create a statewide authorizing board (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=138#1698); that bill is still pending. In California, the indomitable Caprice Young, head of the statewide charter association, is pushing the General Assembly to approve a plan to allow state universities and community colleges to issue charters. And in Idaho, an attempt to create a statewide board to issue charters - a major plank of Gov. Dirk Kempthorne's charter reform package - failed, though the board will now hear appeals from schools whose applications are rejected or whose charters are not reissued. The move came after an intense legislative fight over whether Idaho's charters were serving their intended populations or functioning as havens for middle class kids whose parents were looking to spring them from local district schools.

"Teachers, boards accept charter school reform package," Associated Press, March 15, 2004  (registration required)

"The big picture on charter schools gets swept to the side," Idaho Statesman, March 16, 2004

"Bill would relax charter school rules," by Suzanne Pardington, San Jose Mercury News, March 15, 2004

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Charter sponsorship change pushed in three states

Rigged elections in Gotham

March 18, 2004

"It was a political hit that would make Tony Soprano blush." Just hours before the New York City Panel for Education Policy - successor to the Big Apple's school board - was to vote on Mayor Bloomberg's controversial plan to hold back third graders who failed the city's math and reading tests, the mayor axed two of his own hand-picked board members and orchestrated the firing of a third, all of whom were threatening to oppose the policy. "This is what mayoral control is all about," Bloomberg said. "A few of the [board] members didn't agree or were afraid they'd be pressured by outsiders or politicized, so I replaced them with people who agreed with my views." Not surprisingly, the move enraged the mayor's critics, including United Federation of Teachers' president Randi Weingarten, who called it a "Monday night bloodbath." "Mayor Bloomberg manages the Department of Education by instilling fear," assailed Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. This week's hit on the city's school board members was the last straw for Weingarten and Diane Ravitch, both of whom initially supported Bloomberg's takeover of the city's schools. Today, the pair called on the state legislature to "re-establish an independent board of respected citizens to set policy for the schools" because the mayor's reorganization of city schools and the way he and his team set policy not only leaves "out any role for public involvement, it has also led to serious malfunctioning of school

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Rigged elections in Gotham

Looking forward on Brown

March 18, 2004

U.S. News & World Report has a fantastic special issue on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. One of the articles therein, "Unequal Education," is as fine a lay-of-the-land piece on education we've seen in many a year. It highlights the importance of setting standards, testing regularly, and upgrading expectations at every level of K-12 education, and even ventures into the more controversial area of cultural expectations and their effects on student achievement. The story also profiles a number of successful schools that serve minorities and the tough-love approach they've taken with students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. The issue is well worth the newsstand price.

"Unequal education," U.S. News & World Report, March 22, 2004

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Looking forward on Brown

Academic Atrophy: The Condition of the Liberal Arts in America's Public Schools

Kathleen Porter-Magee / March 18, 2004

Council for Basic Education
March 2004

The Council for Basic Education has gone back to its roots of defending liberal arts education with this report, which describes principals' perception of whether the amount of classroom time being devoted to reading, math, science, social studies/history, civics, geography, foreign language, and the arts - all central to a well-rounded liberal arts education - has increased or decreased over the past several years, and whether they expect it to increase/decrease in the near future. CBE undertook this study out of concern that, despite the many positive potential benefits of NCLB, that statute "may well contribute to a significant danger that has not received the attention it deserves: At a time when school budgets are under extraordinary stress, the exclusive focus on the law's accountability provisions on mathematics, reading, and, eventually, science is diverting significant time and resources from other academic subjects." Not surprisingly, survey results tend to confirm this suspicion: about 75 percent of schools have increased their instructional time devoted to reading, math, and science and authors found "ample evidence of waning commitment to the arts, foreign language, and elementary social studies," particularly in schools with high minority populations. For example, while only nine percent of low-minority school principals reported a decrease in the instructional time devoted to foreign languages, 23 percent of principals in high-minority schools reported such decreases. This trend was even more acute in social studies, where, overall, 29 percent

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Academic Atrophy: The Condition of the Liberal Arts in America's Public Schools

Why Is It So Hard to Get Good Schools?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 18, 2004

Larry Cuban, Teachers College Press
January 2003

Veteran Stanford educationist Larry Cuban based this 96-pager on his Julius & Rosa Sachs Lectures at Teachers College two years back. Think of it as a broadside trained against the standards-based reform fleet, which Cuban terms a "corporate-inspired reform coalition." He says the "present educational orthodoxy is bad for American schools" for four reasons: (1) The goal of preparing students to succeed in an "information-based workplace has largely overwhelmed the fundamental purpose of tax-supported public schools in a democracy," namely building citizens. (2) There's no credible evidence that students who pass tests and finish high school will go on to succeed in college and employment. (3) The "nurturing of a one-best-school" ignores student differences and the "historic diversity of 'good' schools." (4) Schools and students are overburdened with responsibility for making this regimen succeed while society's "structural inequalities" (e.g. racism, poverty) get ignored. A cri-de-coeur, to be sure, from a literate, passionate and decent man with long experience in the education trenches. But it's also stereotypical educationist thinking tinged with Marxist paranoia, and it doesn't offer much of an alternative to the regimen that he laments. Have a look, if you will. The ISBN is 0807742945 and you'll find more information at http://store.tcpress.com/0807742945.shtml.

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Why Is It So Hard to Get Good Schools?

A Policymaker's Primer on Education Research

Eric Osberg / March 18, 2004

Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning and the Education Commission of the States
February 2004

This report can be seen as an introductory course on the methods used by education researchers and as a guide to basic statistics. Its purpose is to help the non-statisticians among us decipher and appraise research reports. It points out a number of common pitfalls that often snag lay readers of stats-heavy writing and helps explain how to avoid them. For example, when drawing conclusions about research, it's important not to assume that correlation equals causation, to apply research results to a setting that differs from the tested environment, or to rely overmuch on conclusions drawn from small sample sizes (which can produce statistically insignificant results). The guide is easy to read, avoids excessive detail and has a handy index of terms. Those who study education but lack a quantitative background may want it on their shelves. This is the second in a series funded by the Department of Education to "improve the connection between research and policy" (We reviewed the first, Eight Questions on Teacher Preparation: What Does the Research Say?, at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=110#1383.) You can find this new resource online at http://www.ecs.org/html/educationIssues/Research/primer/index.asp.

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A Policymaker's Primer on Education Research

"Why Do I Have To Learn This Stuff?": Misinformation and the American High-School Literature Textbook

March 18, 2004

Kyle Stevens, Trafford Publishing
2004

There are lies, damn lies, and then there are literature textbooks, which teacher Kyle Stevens here charges with gross malfeasance for filling the heads of students with error and misinformation. The monograph is not long enough to be a sustained examination along the lines of Diane Ravitch's recent Fordham report on history textbooks (see http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=329). But it does note specific instances in which interpretative or contextual remarks in major literature textbooks are simply wrong - wrong in their assessment of how historical or cultural events affected great works of literature, wrong in how they lay out the development of literary trends and movements, and often just plain wrong about facts. Stevens calls on teachers and students to throw out their textbooks and engage the great works themselves, free of the interpretative miasma of error-riddled textbooks. And while he occasionally veers into pedantry - is it so wrong to call the statesman and theologian Thomas More "a churchman," for example? - Stevens certainly impresses with his passionate defense of great literature as essential to the education of the young. You can buy the book at http://www.trafford.com/4dcgi/view-item?item=4353&66235740-22714aaa#goto2

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"Why Do I Have To Learn This Stuff?": Misinformation and the American High-School Literature Textbook