Teacher can't teach

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 24, 2005

Over the past half-century, the number of pupils in U.S. schools grew by about 50 percent while the number of teachers nearly tripled. Spending per student rose threefold, too. If the teaching force had simply kept pace with enrollments, school budgets had risen as they did, and nothing else changed, today's average teacher would earn nearly $100,000, plus generous benefits. We'd have a radically different view of the job and it would attract different sorts of people.

Yes, classes would be larger - about what they were when I was in school. True, there'd be fewer specialists and supervisors. And we wouldn't have as many instructors for youngsters with "special needs." But teachers would earn twice what they do today (less than $50,000, on average) and talented college graduates would vie for the relatively few openings in those ranks.

What America has done, these past 50 years, is invest in more teachers rather than better ones, even as countless appealing and lucrative options have opened up for the able women who once poured into public schooling. No wonder teaching salaries have just kept pace with inflation, despite huge increases in education budgets. No wonder the teaching occupation, with blessed exceptions, draws people from the lower ranks of our lesser universities. No wonder there are shortages in key branches of this sprawling profession. When you employ three million people and you don't pay very well, it's hard to keep a field fully staffed,

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Teacher can't teach

A dogfight in California

March 24, 2005

It's a no-rules steel cage match to the death in California, pitting the California Teachers Association against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Union members are expected to approve a proposal to increase member dues by $180 over three years, a levy that will add a staggering $54 million to the $11 million war chest the union has assembled to fight the Governor's education proposals. CTA plans to postpone every project that is not "absolutely necessary" and is warning teachers that Schwarzenegger's plans put careers and retirements in jeopardy. The union opposes his support for teacher merit pay, even in light of strong public approval. It opposes his legislation to reform the calcified tenure system. And it opposes what it calls massive cuts in education, even though education spending is actually increasing. But don't expect the Governator to roll over. He is fighting back with a series of new ads touting his reforms. Should be an exciting summer.

"Governor rolls out TV ads that tout reforms for education," by David M. Drucker, Inside Bay Area, March 18, 2005

"Putting students first," by Margaret Fortune, Voice of San Diego, March 10, 2005

"Teachers union wants dues raised," by Alexa H. Bluth, Sacramento Bee, March 19, 2005

"Rewards, not tenure," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2005 (subscription required)

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A dogfight in California

Head Start reform a non-starter?

March 24, 2005

The Department of Health and Human Services is under fire for not doing enough to ferret out financial mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in Head Start programs. A GAO report found that three-quarters of the Head Start programs the agency reviewed in 2000 showed financial and administrative irregularities, many with multiple infractions, and about half of the programs had irregularities for three or more years - even after being notified that they needed to get their act in order. Republicans have seized upon the report to revive the effort to restructure Head Start into a state-run block grant program; Head Start supporters say most of the violations are minor, "parking ticket" offenses and the whole thing is a precursor to a campaign to close the program. Lost in the debate is serious consideration of precisely what kind of pre-schooling at-risk kids most need. We know for a fact that Head Start isn't providing it. (See here for more.) As Congress considers overhauling Head Start's administrative and financial management protocols, we hope that someone will spare a thought to overhauling the curriculum. 

"Government is criticized on oversight of Head Start," by Greg Winter, New York Times, March 18, 2005 (subscription required)

"Report finds weak federal oversight of Head Start program," by Ben Feller, Associated Press, March 18, 2005 (subscription required)

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Head Start reform a non-starter?

Back to school to see Dewey's legacy

March 24, 2005

Roger Shattuck, a distinguished literary and cultural critic from Boston University, has a fascinating story in the New York Review of Books about serving on a local school board in Vermont. To his chagrin, Shattuck discovers that the Green Mountain State's Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities amount to little more than vague exhortations, prescribing no particular course of study or specific subjects to be mastered. (We've made the same observation; see our recent evaluations of state math and English standards.) Shattuck uses this episode to embark on an examination of John Dewey's famous formulation of the synthesis between "child-centered" and curriculum-centered education. It's a sensitive and disarmingly dispassionate examination of a topic that manages even today to roil emotions, and Shattuck's essay is hard to summarize. We take slight exception to two points. First, Shattuck assumes that Dewey's synthesis of what we now call "constructivism" and "standards-based education" is without inherent tensions and contradictions. That's a bit too neat; in fact, today's curricular and pedagogical battles spring in part from inherent tensions and even contradictions in Dewey's thought. Second, Shattuck makes the mistake of assuming that all standards must be vague and hortatory by their nature, and therefore advocates dropping state standards in favor of adopting curricula that prescribe specific topics, works, and notions. He's wrong; good standards do exist, and the best curricula respond to high-quality expectations from states. In the end, there must be some

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Back to school to see Dewey's legacy

Where in the world?

March 24, 2005

Recent discussions about inadequate high schools have focused on improving math and English. But topics like geography remain in desperate need of attention as well. Several years ago, a poll reported that only 13 percent of Americans ages 18-24 could find Iraq on a map, and scores on the 2001 geography NAEP were dismayingly low for high school students. One college professor in this week's Washington Times reports that a mere 20 percent of her students could find Thailand on a map following the devastating tsunami. Parents, educators, and geography-oriented organizations are making some progress at giving the subject greater priority in schools across America. In 2004, 10,471 students took the AP Geography course, compared to only 3,000 in 2001. The Geographic Education National Implementation Project (GENIP), which offers a voluntary geography standards framework for states, reports that forty-nine states (all but Iowa) have adopted standards based on GENIP's guidelines. According to Sarah Bednarz, a professor of geography at Texas A&M (and coordinator of GENIP), students should know more than simply the obvious names, spellings, and locations on a map but should also know context and connections between people and places. Not doing so, she says, "would be like saying mathematics is all arithmetic."

"Lost in geography," Ann Geracimos, Washington Times, March 21, 2005

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Where in the world?

Holding back hard-charging high schoolers

March 24, 2005

If only every school had this problem. School officials at the affluent New Trier High School in northern Chicago, a high-performing public school that sends 95 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, are discussing plans that they hope will decrease student intensity. Officials say extreme parental pressure to win admission to elite colleges causes students to overburden themselves by taking the toughest classes and packing multiple extracurricular activities into their days. At New Trier, almost 150 students skip lunch, while many others arrive to school early (around 7:00 a.m.) to take more classes - up to an astonishing nine classes per day. Officials want to make lunch mandatory and require students who show up early to take a free period later in the day. But this has drawn criticism from students like Melissa Birkhold, who skips lunch for chamber orchestra (her third music class) and hopes to be a musician some day: "They're trying to cut out some of the arts classes, and they don't understand that that's what makes life fun...I don't think they should tell me I have to take both lunch and a free period." Certainly, some perspective is required. But school officials should be careful about regulations that curtail ambition and useful activity (think of France's mandatory 35-hour work week, designed to impose leisure, which has crippled the French economy). Should "Do Less" really be the message school leaders send to students?

"Hard-charging high

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Holding back hard-charging high schoolers

A foolproof plan

March 24, 2005

A Bronx teacher at notoriously bad Middle School 142 was charged this week with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes following the discovery that he paid a former homeless man two dollars to take his state certification exam. The teacher, Wayne Brightly, was "tired of flunking" and was scared of losing his $59,000 salary if he failed again. Brightly is a 38-year-old tall black man; Rubin Leitner, his exam "fill-in," is a 58-year-old overweight white man with Asperger's Syndrome. "No one would ever know," Brightly promised. And apparently on exam day, no one was the wiser. It wasn't until Leitner passed the exam, scoring much, much higher than Brightly ever had in the past, that state officials realized something was awry. Read the full story: it's too good to miss.

"Schoolhouse crock," by Lisa Munoz, Jonathan Lemire, and Joe Williams, New York Daily News, March 23, 2005

"Klein furious over 'dunce' teacher," by Kathleen Lucadamo and Joe Williams, New York Daily News, March 24, 2005

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A foolproof plan

A Profile of the American High School Sophomore in 2002: Initial Results From the Base Year of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 24, 2005

National Center for Education Statistics
March 2005

This 140-page report from NCES tells you everything you could conceivably want to know about U.S. high-school sophomores in 2001-2, the first stage of a new multi-year longitudinal study. The data are extremely important, especially considering the nation's current obsession with high-school reform, though one wishes the government could produce them in less than three years. (The students profiled here are the class that graduated last June and are now 9-10 months beyond high school.) There is LOTS of information here, including demographics, data on school (and extracurricular) experiences, students' use of time, their "values, expectations and plans," and quite a lot about their reading and math prowess based on a specially tailored test. That test gauged reading proficiency at three different levels and math skills at five levels. The news is not good. While most tenth graders possess very basic skills, the percentage who can read at the level of "simple inference" is less than half and the fraction that can handle "intermediate level" math concepts (and formulate "multi-step solutions to word problems") is just one in five. Yet when asked about their educational aspirations, 72 percent expect to graduate from a four-year college and half expect to earn a graduate degree. Talk about a major mismatch between hope and reality. You can root around in these data to your heart's content, and I predict you will find your sense of alarm steadily rising

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A Profile of the American High School Sophomore in 2002: Initial Results From the Base Year of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002

The Public Schools

Eric Osberg / March 24, 2005

Susan H. Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson, editors, Oxford University Press
April 2005

This volume, in Annenberg's "Institutions of Democracy" series, compiles 14 chapters from different writers on the role of schools in a democratic society. Once you know that the bulk of the authors come from ed schools, you get a good idea of what will be said, and the authors generally do not disappoint. Thus we learn that "what the Greeks defined as classical liberal training for broad civic engagement has been largely displaced by regimented instruction in many nations, simply to fit graduates into neoclassical tenets that advance markets and material consumption," that the curriculum frameworks of E.D. Hirsch are "unwieldy and random," and of course that "voucher programs challenge the very publicness of education." Even worse, there is only brief discussion of the quality of civic and historical education today; instead, of course, the dominant barriers to developing good citizens are that schools might not do enough to teach students how to "deliberate," and that the "subordinate status" of teachers means they "cannot be good models for their students and teach in ways that encourage independent thought and action" (for students learn about democracy in part "through the conduct of their classes and school") - as if it were obvious that all organizations are best run as mini-democracies. One author dares support choice (among public schools, anyway), but mostly to combat the persistent "customs of racial steering in home-buying

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The Public Schools

Why Our Schools Are Failing: What Parents Need to Know About Australian Education

March 24, 2005

Kevin Donnelly, Menzies Research Centre
2004

From Down Under comes this blistering critique of the Australian education system. Australians are exiting public schools in record numbers. In 2002, 30 percent of Aussie kids were in private schools, compared to 22 percent in 1980. Donnelly highlights a litany of problems contributing to failing public schools - problems similar, yet often more egregious than the ones we have in America. He argues that Australia's education system is currently "dumbed down, politically correct, and under-performing." Australia's standards are not as rigorous as other high-performing countries, span multiple years, and lack rigorous assessment until the final year of school. Moreover, the curriculum has been hijacked by unions and their bureaucratic allies, who have a fetish for politically correct instructional materials but seemingly little interest in that material's effectiveness. (Last year, for example, a six-year-old boy from Queensland was suspended for sexual harassment when he "poked a girl on the bum" and was made to review a picture of a naked woman and point to the area he touched.) Finally, Australia has adopted an outcomes-based approach to learning, which eschews a syllabus or standards and instead has teachers judge students' success through vague guidelines. This handholding has lead to innovations like "fuzzy math" (primary students use calculators and no longer perform simple equations like long division) and "whole learning" (students look and guess to determine the meaning of words). Like many right-wing critics of political

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Why Our Schools Are Failing: What Parents Need to Know About Australian Education

Value-Added Assessment of Teacher Quality as an Alternative to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: What Recent Studies Say

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / March 24, 2005

George K. Cunningham and J. E. Stone, JAM Press
March 2005

This essay from a forthcoming book (Value Added Models in Education: Theory and Applications, edited by Robert Lissitz) concludes that "the achievement gains associated with NBPTS certification are small and thus give rise to the question of whether its costs are worth its benefits." As a lower-cost alternative, the authors recommend value-added analysis of student test data by teacher. In particular, they suggest monetary awards or bonuses to teachers whose pupils "meet or exceed the 90th percentile of local district gains." What this mostly is, however, is an analysis of four extant studies (all small) of NBPTS certification, one of them by co-author Stone. You can find it here.

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Value-Added Assessment of Teacher Quality as an Alternative to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: What Recent Studies Say