Silly season in academe

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / October 14, 2004

Presidential election campaigns bring out the worst in academics whose partisan yearnings overcome their scholarly scruples.

The past week brought a spectacular specimen of this sorry genre from Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller, who, on October 7, loosed a "study" that armed the Kerry-Edwards campaign with misleading information about post-NCLB reading scores in key states. Hours later, Senator Kerry pulled the pin and hurled it:

Just yesterday, the President said, because of his education reform, reading scores are increasing in our public schools. Well, ladies and gentlemen, a new study released today says that is just plain not true. The facts are that [in] 11 out of our largest 15 states, reading scores are flat or have gone down.

One can't help but recall four years ago when, weeks before the election, a RAND analyst released a "study" purporting to show that achievement gains in Texas were not as rosy as then-Governor Bush claimed. (It was rebutted by, among others, another RAND analysis.)

The initial press release for Fuller's study was issued on the letterhead of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a generally respectable outfit co-located on the campuses of Berkeley, Stanford, and UC-Davis and underwritten by the Hewlett Foundation. Fuller is one of its three co-directors. Stanford's eminent Michael W. Kirst is another. The "contact person" named in the release was PACE's director of government relations. The core "finding" reported therein was that "no consistent pattern of gains in children's reading skills

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Silly season in academe

Jacques Derrida, ed theorist

October 14, 2004

This weekend, French thinker Jacques Derrida, father of the literary method known as "deconstruction," died of pancreatic cancer. His wide-ranging influence on intellectual life on this planet even trickled down into K-12 education, where it has inspired some of our wackier and less responsible pedagogical theorists.

For Derrida, nothing external to language could be truly conveyed through language. That is, words refer not to things, but to other words, a view that undermines the traditional assumption that literature directly reflects and interprets reality. His dissections of important texts in the Western tradition were undeniably the work of a powerful intellect. However, critics often accused him of willful obscurity, nihilistic punning, and other sordid crimes against the Western tradition. One of Derrida's own descriptions of the deconstructive method may serve as evidence for the prosecution:

And "deconstructions," which I prefer to say in the plural, has no doubt never named a project, a method, or a system. Especially not a philosophical system. Within contexts always very well defined, it is one of the possible names used to designate, in sum by metonymy, what occurs, or cannot manage to occur, namely a certain dislocation which in effect reiterates itself regularly - and wherever there is something rather than nothing: within what is classically called the texts of classical philosophy, of course and for example, but also within any "text," in the general sense which I try to justify for this word, that is

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Jacques Derrida, ed theorist

More of the same&

October 14, 2004

As part of the New York Times' all out assault on education reform this election year, the editorial board (which has yet to retract or correct its misleading editorial on the AFT charter report--click here and here for more) put forward another series of misleading and contradictory arguments on Sunday entitled "How to rescue education reform." The core of the Times' argument is that the Bush administration undermined NCLB "when it saddled the states with new responsibilities and shortchanged them by $6 billion." We've covered this argument before (click here). Bottom line: the editorial writers assume that states will choose unnecessarily expensive assessment mechanisms and achieve no efficiencies in their implementation of NCLB. (It's also worth recalling that they're getting $4 billion in additional federal funds to cover such costs.) Now, the Times uses the GAO's recent report (reviewed below) to argue that the administration has been lax in its oversight of state implementation of NCLB, a critique not evidently shared by state departments of education and legislators now howling about the federal intrusion due to NCLB. "Part of the problem," the editors complain, "is the lingering presumption that public schooling is largely a 'local matter' - even when states contravene the national interest by doing a horrendous job." So, is the Times now for a national education ministry to run the schools? Perhaps. We're not. Yes, they're right that portions of NCLB are ill-drafted, that states are

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More of the same&

The new education philanthropy

October 14, 2004

There's new Europe and old Europe, and now there's the new education philanthropy and the old education philanthropy, according to Rick Hess in Philanthropy magazine. The old version focused on working within the system and making nice with school districts and assorted education interest groups - and much of it expired with Walter Annenberg's failed challenge. The new education philanthropy seeks to shake up the system, work from the outside in, and spur needed reforms opposed by entrenched interests: consider, for example, the approaches taken by the Gates, Walton, Pisces, Broad, and Milken foundations. As just one sign of how quickly new philanthropy has supplanted old, consider this: in 1998, the top four K-12 funders were the Annenberg, Lilly, Packard, and Kellogg foundations - old philanthropists all. Just six years later, the top two are Gates and Walton, which together account for one-quarter of all K-12 giving among the top 50 foundations.

"Re-tooling K-12 giving," by Frederick M. Hess, Philanthropy, September-October 2004

"Making it count: A guide to high impact education philanthropy," by Kelly Amis and Chester E. Finn, Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, September 1, 2001

"Jumpstarting the charter movement," The Philanthropy Roundtable

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The new education philanthropy

How best to write well

October 14, 2004

How do you teach kids to write: through the spirit or the law? That is, should writing be taught through careful attention to grammar, syntax, and composition? Or should the first task be encouraging youngsters to pour their hearts upon the page without regard for subjects, verbs, and objects? While hedging its bets just a bit, Educational Leadership lines up with the latter view this month, in a series of articles on teaching writing. As editor Marge Scherer assures us, "Log into a blog or two or sneak a peek at students' instant messaging and you will find that the art of writing is alive and well. The voice, the substance, the interest, and the humor are there, even if the grammar, the spelling, and the topic sentences are often not." This is not a worthwhile trade, in our opinion. (And we have to wonder if Scherer has ever seen many actual instant messages, which usually read something like, "WU? WAN2TLK DIS WKND?" In fact, teachers are beginning to complain that IM-speak is making its way into formal essays, even among college students.) We tend to take the former view, that style and panache are the product of careful mastery of the rules, and that one good way to master them is to learn how to diagram sentences. So we were amused to read novelist Kitty Burns Florey's witty reminiscence of diagramming sentences in elementary school. Gadfly spent many years

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How best to write well

No Child Left Behind Act: Improvements Needed in Education's Process for Tracking States' Implementation of Key Provisions

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / October 14, 2004

United States Government Accountability Office
September 2004

The GAO (now officially the "Government Accountability Office") is the source of this appraisal of Executive Branch implementation of NCLB, which reveals vast state-by-state variability on multiple dimensions and describes some gaps in the Education Department's handling of that situation. Enclosed in the report is a five-page response by Deputy Secretary Eugene Hickok that disputes several of GAO's main conclusions and says that most of the recommended changes are either underway or unnecessary.

Much of the argument centers on the fact that the Department had given "full approval" to just 28 state NCLB plans by July 31, while the rest had been "approved with conditions." Moreover, "17 states did not have approved academic standards and testing systems in place" two and a half years after NCLB was signed - and the Department "did not have a written process to track that states are taking steps toward meeting the conditions set for full approval. . . . ."

That's a typical GAO criticism. But the more interesting and worrying information in this report has to do with inter-state variability on many dimensions of NCLB and with the accuracy of reporting data. "[T]he percentage of students expected to meet proficiency goals in the first year varied widely. . . . States also varied in the minimum size of designated groups...[and] in the percentage of students they expected to be proficient annually . . . [and] in how they

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No Child Left Behind Act: Improvements Needed in Education's Process for Tracking States' Implementation of Key Provisions

The Funding Gap 2004

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / October 14, 2004

Kevin Carey, The Education Trust
Fall 2004

The Education Trust's Kevin Carey is the author of this 17-pager contending that, despite any number of "equity" and "adequacy" lawsuits and ceaseless increases in education spending, many states still spend less per student in high-poverty districts than in more prosperous communities. These data are from 2001-2 and use state and district revenues only. Various adjustments are involved. EdTrust's bottom line: half the states spend less per pupil in high-poverty districts and 31 states spend less in high-minority districts. On the other hand, the remaining states, for the most part, spend more in such districts. For example, while Illinois and New York spend less, Massachusetts, and New Jersey spend more in poor/minority districts. EdTrust goes on to say that it actually costs 40 percent more to educate a poor kid (basing that figure on a formula found in an obscure section of NCLB) and that, when state funding is calculated accordingly, 36 states under-fund their high poverty, high minority districts. As for recent changes, according to Carey's calculations, 27 states "shrunk their gaps" between 1997 and 2002 while gaps widened in 22. Not surprisingly, he urges states to take various steps to eradicate those gaps and provide adequate resources to schools with needy kids. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I note that a lot of high-poverty places that are also high spending (e.g. the District of Columbia, Newark) are providing kids with

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The Funding Gap 2004

Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Teaching and Educational Practice

Eric Osberg / October 14, 2004

Dennis Evans, Editor, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
2005

As the title suggests, this book offers views from both sides of scads of education issues, such as classroom discipline, service learning, school uniforms, sex education, and religion in schools. Many of these twenty topics are of interest to teachers, principals and others who make decisions about how to run classrooms and schools; others have broader policy implications, such as home schooling and common curricula. The forty chapters - one on each side of every issue - come from a variety of sources: articles in Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, and Education Week, and papers by the Heritage Foundation, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, even the Fordham Foundation, to name just a few. The authors are also a varied bunch, from Tom Loveless and Mike Podgursky to Gary Nash and Alfie Kohn. It even includes opposing court decisions from Justices Thomas and Ginsberg, arguing the legality of drug testing in schools. The book's strength is its balance, as it enables the reader to understand the arguments and begin to appraise the tradeoffs on these issues. It's exasperating, though, that in this format even the weakest of arguments must be given equal time; the one page summaries following each point-counterpoint exchange are loath to favor one side over the other - even when both sides aren't making equally compelling arguments. Also, parts of the book are dated (this is the second edition and just two chapters

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Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Teaching and Educational Practice