The shape of things to come

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 9, 2005

The Association of Educational Publishers (www.edpress.org) asked me and several others to gaze into our crystal balls and identify five "trends/factors/events that will (or should) have significant impact on the substance and delivery of educational content over the next five years." This turned out to be an interesting exercise, the results of which I offer to you, dear reader, and invite your thoughts.

First, technology and the gradual separation of teaching and learning from buildings called schools. Increasingly, school is an institutional provider of child care and socialization but education is happening all over the place as a growing fraction of it is delivered electronically rather than face-to-face in classrooms. Many students will still sit in school, to be sure; others, however, will do much learning at home, in summer camps and day care centers, in churches, boys and girls clubs, and libraries.

The proliferation of virtual schools and virtual charter schools is just part of the story.

Coming soon are hybrid institutions, where the kid may or may not be in a school but much of his instruction and instructional materials come from far away. His main teacher may be on the other side of the country or the globe. The adult in the classroom with him may resemble a teacher aide, tutor, or college intern, there more to keep order, answer questions, and help him learn rather than someone to present a lesson setting forth what's to be

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The shape of things to come

Florida vouchers - the saga continues

June 9, 2005

Lots of action but no resolution for Florida's Opportunity Scholarships. The state's Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday. John Tierney flexes his new muscles on the New York Times op-ed page (proving Gadfly's early praise correct, see here) with a column about the impending ruling's impact on the kids the program was designed to help (see here for more on the debate). Instead of rehashing the constitutional argument, Tierney asks a question often overlooked when vouchers are on the line: is the program actually achieving what it was designed to do? "Test scores have gone up more rapidly at schools facing the threat of vouchers than at other schools," he writes, "and the latest study, by Martin West and Paul Peterson of Harvard, shows that Florida's program is much more effective than . . . No Child Left Behind." The Sarasota Herald-Tribune points out that if, in fact, the forthcoming high court ruling clobbers Opportunity Scholarships, other programs in the state, including the brand new pre-K program (click here for more on Florida's plan) could be at risk as well. If you're still searching for balanced news stories that parse the motives behind this debate, check out the St. Petersburg Times. For now, the entire state remains perched on the edges of its seats.

"A chance to escape," by John Tierney, New York Times, June 7, 2005 (subscription required)

"Pre-K plan

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Florida vouchers - the saga continues

Battle royale: teacher training

June 9, 2005

In the Journal of Teacher Education, Rick Hess writes that there is nothing unpredictable or even surprising about the debate over teacher training. One side - comprised mainly of institutions and individuals responsible for training and licensing teachers under the usual rules - sees the system as well-ordered and sensible (though needing improvement) and wants to tinker around the edges while maintaining central tendencies and approaches. The other (from which Hess hails) wants to tear the system down and start over along entirely new lines that emphasize efficiency, minimal bureaucratic regulation, and an emphasis on results. So far, so good: everyone is fighting for their interest or belief, a situation that Hess regards as natural, even welcome. What is odd, he notes, is the extraordinary rancor of this debate. Ad hominem attacks, overblown rhetoric, and the imputation of sinister motives are failings of both sides and have made compromise next to impossible. Hess buttresses his case with a few anecdotes from his days at the ed school at the University of Virginia, when he critcized teacher training as presently practiced and in turn was roundly criticized in nasty, personal terms. A perceptive take on the whole debate. And as if on cue, and to document Hess's point about rancor, none other than the rancorous Gerald Bracey strode into the debate with a niggling critique of Hess's sourcing, accusing him of "sophistry," taking "gratuitous swipe[s]," and on and on in the tiresome

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Battle royale: teacher training

Friedman and vouchers

June 9, 2005

In the Wall Street Journal, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman describes the history of the voucher movement, its philosophical foundations, and why choice in education is even more important today. In 1955, Friedman's historic article, "The Role of Government in Education," conceded that there was some value in government's role in requiring and financing schooling, but concluded that the "nationalization" of education made little sense. His initial ideas were mainly philosophical, but the rapid deterioration of schools gave substantial weight to his work and was a strong spur to the voucher movement he helped create. Repeated attempts have been made at establishing vouchers since the release of "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, yet most come under vigorous, well-funded attacks that have usually ended such proposals. Meanwhile, the old system of pumping endless amounts of money into failing schools is clearly in its death throes. Friedman concludes that one day a state will attempt a universal voucher plan, and then "a competitive private educational market serving parents who are free to choose the school they believe best for each child will demonstrate how it can revolutionize schooling."
 
"Free to choose," by Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2005(subscription required)

"School choice showdown," Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2005  (subscription required)

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Friedman and vouchers

This textbook brought to you by MTV

June 9, 2005

The Toronto Star reports that McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. is considering selling advertising in college textbooks, the better to target free-spending college students. The company claims the ads are intended to bring "beneficial corporate and social awareness campaigns to the students." Gadfly sees infinite potential in this innovation. A Big Mac next to Marx's Communist Manifesto could inform students of the ills of capitalism - think of the irony! These ads, however, come as no surprise from a greedy, heedless industry that scores big profits by producing watered-down material (see The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption). "Reach a hard to get target group where they spend all their parents' money," a sales brochure from McGraw proclaims. "Do you really think 18-24 year olds see those on-campus magazine ads? Do you really think they could miss an ad that is placed in a very well-respected textbook?" This assumes, of course, that any students still read this stuff, and there's no real proof of that.

"Publisher pushes textbooks ads," by Rick Westhead, Toronto Star, June 7, 2005

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This textbook brought to you by MTV

Broad reforms

June 9, 2005

This week in the Los Angeles Times, Naomi Schaefer Riley describes the Broad Foundation's fellowship program that puts young, skilled executives from the private world into top positions in urban school districts. Many experience culture shock once dropped into these bureaucracies where they must contend with "antiquated accounting systems, personnel with the most basic training in word-processing programs, [and] enormous bureaucracies with no clear statement of how people get promoted from one position to another." Most distressing for Broad Fellows who hail from the private sector: "[T]hat public school systems pretend they don't have to operate like other companies and organizations, that they can get the best people without giving them incentives, that their funding comes from heaven, that being a public employee charged with doing nice things for children means never having to answer to shareholders - in this case, taxpayers."

"Ed board could use some Wal-Mart smarts," by Naomi Schaefer Riley, Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2005

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Broad reforms

The Condition of Education 2005

June 9, 2005

National Center for Education Statistics
June 2005

The latest edition of NCES's vast, annual, congressionally-mandated Condition of Education (COE) has landed in our mailbox. Like everyone else, we're trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in this vast compendium. For starters, a few items of note:

• Minority enrollment in public schools increased from 1972 to 2003, mostly due to growth in Hispanic enrollments. Total public school enrollment is expected to reach 50 million in 2014, with the western states seeing the most growth.
• The number of K-12 private school students increased from 1989 to 2002, though private school enrollments shrank slightly as a percentage of total elementary/secondary enrollments. (Possibly as a result of growth in charter schools and home schooling? COE doesn't say.) Catholic schools are still the biggest chunk of the private sector, though shrinking. Meanwhile, the percentage of students enrolled in "other religious" private schools rose from 32 to 36 percent, with conservative Christian schools experiencing the largest increase.
• The achievement gap persists: whites and Asians outperform blacks and Hispanics. Also, rural and suburban students outperform students from large central city public schools in reading and mathematics.
• The immediately-after-high-school college enrollment rate has held steady at about 64 percent since 1998. Between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s, the matriculation gap narrowed between blacks and whites but widened between Hispanics and whites.
• From 1992 through 2002, schools got safer - theft fell by 58 percent, violent crimes of all

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  The Condition of Education 2005

Learning to Lead: What Gets Taught in Principal Preparation Programs

June 9, 2005

Frederick M. Hess, Andrew P. Kelly, Harvard University Program in Education Policy and Governance
May 2005Textbook Leadership? An Analysis of Leading Books Used in Principal Preparation
Frederick M. Hess, Andrew P. Kelly, Harvard University Program in Education Policy and Governance
May 2005

Two reports by Rick Hess and Andrew Kelly conclude that principals are not being taught the skills necessary to run 21st century schools. In "Learning to Lead?" the authors analyze a variety of prominent principal training programs and find that little attention is paid to results-oriented methods, such as using data to improve student achievement and measure teacher quality. They note, "Principals receive limited training in the use of data, research, technology, the hiring or termination of personnel, or evaluating personnel . . . [and] little exposure to important management scholarship or sophisticated inquiry on educational productivity and governance."  In "Textbook Leadership," the authors examine eleven of the most frequently assigned education administration texts and find that accountability, data collection and analysis rarely appear. These texts tend to support using data as an information tool, but not as a guide to making difficult decisions, such as the hiring and firing of teachers. The authors insist that principals must learn "tough-minded management." Great analyses and worthy additions to the ed school debate. You can check them out on the web here.

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Learning to Lead: What Gets Taught in Principal Preparation Programs

Chasing the Blues Away: Charter Schools Scale Up in Chicago

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 9, 2005

Robin Lake and Lydia Rainey, Progressive Policy Institute
May 2005

Lake and Rainey of the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education authored this latest entry in PPI's series on charter schools in key states and cities. In 35 pages, it recaps the gnarly history of school reform in the Windy City and places charter schools into that context. Despite a tight state-imposed charter-school cap, support from Mayor Daley and successive school CEOs Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan - as well as some imaginative entrepreneurship on the ground - has yielded 27 functioning charter campuses enrolling 3.6 percent of all the kids in town. That's paltry, given the size of the place and the more dramatic growth visible in cities like Washington and Dayton. What's most interesting is the report's perceptive discussion of the pros and cons of the school system itself leading the charter movement and serving as sole authorizer. Some people view "district charters" as an oxymoron, others as the main path to urban school reform. Reality surely lies in between. I was struck, reading this accessible and perceptive account, by how hard it is for a district to get this balance right, even when the people at the top are enthusiastic. Of course, it doesn't help that Illinois state authorities are grudging at best toward charter schools and that the state has a miserable charter law. See for yourself here.

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Chasing the Blues Away: Charter Schools Scale Up in Chicago

Reading at Risk: A Forum

June 9, 2005

Mark Bauerlein, ed., Association of Literary Scholars and Critics
Spring 2005

This second issue of Forum by the worthy ALSC (a tradition-minded alternative to the National Association of Scholars) compiles responses to the National Endowment for the Arts' study Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. That important study (released July 2004, see here) found a startling drop in the percentage of adults who read literature (down from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent in 2002, a loss of 20 million potential readers). The steepest decline occurred in young adults (59.8 percent to 42.8 percent). Adults qualified as readers simply by reading one novel, short story, play, or poem within the last year - yet more than half of America didn't qualify! Exploring some of the causes of this decline, various essayists blame the digital age for making information a mile wide and an inch deep, with studies showing that people just scan stories and pick out important details, and lack the ability to dissect complex stories and arguments. Schools also take some blame for failing to properly teach reading skills and important works of literature. Scholars from myriad universities jam this publication with distressing anecdotes from their time in teaching and insightful analyses into this literary problem. The publication breaks no new ground, really, but is worth reading simply for the chance to listen in on some wonderful writers and thinkers taking up serious issues

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Reading at Risk: A Forum