School reform moves to the suburbs

Michael J. Petrilli / July 14, 2005

Despite all the talk about improving inner-city schools, the greatest promise of the No Child Left Behind Act was always in America's leafy suburbs. Unfortunately, that promise is in danger of being squandered.

Because suburban schools are the most likely to post high average test scores that mask large gulfs between students of different races or classes, the law's central premise - that schools be held accountable for the success of all students, be they white, black, Hispanic, low-income or with special needs - should have the greatest impact in them. The law made those achievement gaps transparent and put pressure on every school to focus on the children most in need, even if they represented a small part of the student population.

This suburban phenomenon posed a political challenge to President Bush from the very beginning. Affluent parents and homeowners in the suburbs - the Republican base - were not pleased to hear that many of their beloved local schools were "in need of improvement." This unease translated into outrage from Republican legislators around the country, most audibly in Utah, where the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a bill ordering the state to ignore key sections of the federal law.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the administration would have to bend to political reality. Now Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has offered states a string of exceptions and flexible arrangements that make it less likely that suburban schools will feel the heat

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School reform moves to the suburbs

First thoughts about the NAEP

July 14, 2005

It won't do to be churlish about today's NAEP long-term trend results. But neither should we be gaga. Here are Gadfly's first reflections, with more to come in later editions.

• American kids aren't doing very well but they're doing better than before, at least at ages 9 and 13, at least in math (and some of them in reading). Most of the gains are with younger students and with minority students, and mostly at the low end. (Even at age 9, there was no statistically significant gain in reading at the 90th percentile.)
  
• There's good news in places. Nine-year-olds are posting the best scores ever.  Reading and math scores for nine-year-old African Americans and math scores for black thirteen-year-olds are at an all-time high, while the reading achievement gap for nine-year-olds is narrower. These are heartening data.
  
• Reading remains a problem, though, especially at the middle- and high-school levels, where performance flattens and even drops off. Most likely, accountability and higher standards are having an effect at the lower grades, but that momentum is not being sustained. (We have a few ideas as to why; watch for upcoming Fordham report on the problems of middle schools.)
  
• Seventeen year old achievement remains a big problem, with modest declines posted in both reading and math. Though it's never clear that they take NAEP tests seriously, it's hard to think they were less serious in 2004 than previously. The likely story is that efforts to

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  First thoughts about the NAEP

Pay us more? No thanks!

July 14, 2005

Several years ago, the Florida Legislature created a mandatory merit pay policy for public school systems statewide. At the time, the legislature (naively) allowed districts to set their own eligibility requirements. The St. Petersburg Times reports that "many districts, pressured by teachers unions, developed voluntary plans with so many hurdles that few teachers applied." No shock there, merely more proof of the challenge of instituting reforms from the state level when the unions and other interests pull the districts' strings. Now, Florida's vigorous Education Commissioner John Winn is setting new ground rules to crack down on districts that thwart the spirit of the law. And, again - surprise! - the teacher unions are caterwauling. Florida Education Association spokesman Mark Pudlow questioned the rule change: "You say you have to give more money to teachers who are outstanding, and if you don't, they'll take money away from you? This is a theater of the absurd." More absurd? Whining about low teacher salaries while preventing great teachers from making more.

"State forcing teacher bonuses," Ron Matus, St. Petersburg Times, July 6, 2005

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Pay us more? No thanks!

Tutors for tots

July 14, 2005

We're not sure whether to cheer or jeer. As the Wall Street Journal's June Kronholz reports, the tutoring industry is setting its sights on the Barney set. Sylvan expects to enroll four-year-olds in each of its learning centers by winter; Kaplan's SCORE! centers already teach over 15,000 children from ages four to six. It's a growth industry, but is it a good idea? On the one hand, it's heartening to see parents ignore the dubious advice of take-it-slow child development experts like David Elkind of Tufts who suggests that "parents and teachers wait until a child is six or seven before reading lessons." Six or seven? Gadfly was reading War and Peace by then. On the other hand, this is one more indication of the out-of-control anxiety of middle-class parents, not to mention the "we'll do anything for money" stance of the tutoring firms. If only low-income kids could have access to this kind of help. Now that No Child Left Behind's "supplemental services" provision is starting to show promise, how about transforming Head Start into a mini-voucher for poor pre-K kids? No doubt the tutoring companies would be glad to have the business.

"Preschoolers' prep," by June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2005 (subscription required)

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Tutors for tots

You couldn't pay me to work there

July 14, 2005

We hear it again and again: Americans aren't learning the skills they need to compete in the 21st century. How to prove this theory? Well, follow the money, or in this case, the yen. Toyota, after months of speculation over the destination of its new plant, this week opted for Ontario, reportedly turning down hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from several American states. One reason: retraining U.S. workers is just too burdensome and costly. (Nissan and Honda factories have reportedly encountered workers in Mississippi and Alabama who need pictorials to operate complicated machinery.) This is depressing stuff indeed. That hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies still can't entice a company to locate in the biggest, most lucrative market in the world should serve as a wake-up-call to the citizens of the rejected states.

"Toyota to build 100,000 vehicles per year in Woodstock, Ont., starting 2008," by Steve Erwin, CBC News, July 12, 2005

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You couldn't pay me to work there

Off with their poster contest!

July 14, 2005

In this month's American School Board Journal, Susan Black describes her tenure as director of curriculum and instruction for a Midwestern city school district. Like a French Revolutionary lopping off the heads of the ancien regime, once appointed she decides to root out competition in schools, especially such inhumane exercises as poster and essay contests, charity pledge drives, and other horrors. She even witnessed one first-grade teacher give a child a star for scissoring straight and was horrified that the school's principal didn't intervene. Surveying this scene of psychic disaster and emotional carnage, she "knew it was time to put on the brakes," since we all know that competition "seldom leads to meaningful learning" and "dulls the spirits" of kids. And what evidence did she cite? What else but the goofball works of old progressive, anti-testing warhorses like Alfie Kohn and Marvin Marshall! Under their tutelage, Black calls for positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, social skills, and group processing. Have we heard this before? Old habits die hard, but nothing dies harder than worn-out education fads.

"And the winner is," by Susan Black, American School Board Journal, July 2005

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Off with their poster contest!

Does School Accountability Lead to Improved Student Performance

Eric Osberg / July 14, 2005

Eric A. Hanushek and Margaret E. Raymond, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 24, No. 2
2005

This short, dense article by famed education data gurus Hanushek and Raymond answers the question posed in the title with a "yes": in NAEP scores, they find a "3.5-point gain that came with accountability," a statistically significant amount. As they take pains to show, such analysis is tricky. Accountability systems are imposed statewide, leaving no "control" schools from which to draw comparisons within states. And as in all education analyses, demographics, spending, and any number of other policies muddy the waters - how can one be sure that accountability, not some other factor, led to improved student performance? They acknowledge these challenges and then do a satisfactory job of working through them. For example, they show few discernable differences between early-adopter states and those that implemented their accountability systems more recently - to ease the concern that some other phenomena might have led to both the creation of the accountability systems and the test gains themselves. They then break down the results by race and, disappointingly, find the least gains among black students, with more progress for whites and the most for Hispanics. And they go further. They suggest that introducing accountability systems is associated with only a very slight increase in the number of kids classified as special ed. They also correlate their results with the various Fordham, Education Week, and Carnoy/Loeb ratings

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Does School Accountability Lead to Improved Student Performance

Add and Subtract: Dual Enrollment as a State Strategy to Increase Postsecondary Success for Underrepresented Students

Michael J. Petrilli / July 14, 2005

Nancy Hoffman, Jobs for the Future
April 2005
 
Remaking Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century: What Role for High School Programs?
Richard Kazis, Jobs for the Future
April 2005

These latest installments of the JFF "Double the Numbers" series are worth a look for hardy high school reformers. The first examines programs in Florida, Utah, and New York that allow students to dip their toes into postsecondary education while finishing their high school studies. There's plenty of detail here for policymakers considering their own dual enrollment programs - as well as a frank discussion of the thorny issues to be resolved. Most notably: who pays the bills for such an approach? The second piece is a collection of essays about "Career and Technical Education," formerly known as voc-ed. Those in the field are clearly skittish about the President's proposal to eliminate the entire Perkins voc-tech program (which has as much chance of passing Congress as the Kyoto Treaty). Yet it's hard to find many compelling reasons within these pages to keep it alive. Elliot Medrich of MPR says it best: CTE must "change or die." The reports are available online here and here.

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Add and Subtract: Dual Enrollment as a State Strategy to Increase Postsecondary Success for Underrepresented Students

Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / July 14, 2005

Joyce E. King, editor, Educational Research Association???s Commission on Research in Black Education, 2005

This 440-pager may leave you puzzled and frustrated. Six years in the making, it comes to no coherent conclusions and the twenty essays in this volume follow their own trajectories, some of them interesting and worthwhile (e.g. Linda Darling-Hammond on U.S. school reform and black students), some so esoteric and fantastical as to leave this reader cold. Much of it is lofty, jargon-riddled, and theoretical. Much is about black people in Africa and other lands. Much shares in the dual hazards of post-modernism and Afro-centrism. I cannot recommend it but you might want to know about it. Learn more here.

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Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century