The Education Gadfly
A Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
June 19, 2003, Volume 3, Number 22
Contents
From Checker's Desk
Recommended Reading
- A grand bargain on teacher pay?
- Accountability rollback in CA
- Are charter changes coming to CA?
- Is history, history?
- Teach for America caught in AmeriCorps cuts
Short Reviews
- High School Issue Papers: For Youth and Adult Groups Organizing to Transform High School Education in the United States
- Performance-Driven Budgeting: The Example of New York City's Schools
- Research Perspectives on School Reform: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge
- Teaching Children to Read: The Fragile Links Between Science and Federal Education Policy
- The Performance of California Charter Schools
From Checker's Desk
Four Wars
No, this is not about Iraq but about four raging education battles, three in Washington and one in academe, all with mega policy implications. On the surface, each looks like a conflict between "keep it the way it is even though it isn't working" and "change it even though that'll be disruptive." Not far below is a tussle over?what else??jobs, power, money, influence, and legitimacy.
1. Teaching Pre-schoolers
Head Start has become the subject of intense controversy on Capitol Hill as the Bush administration and some Congressmen move to reform this iconic four-decade old pre-school program in two ways. One is to focus it more explicitly on school-readiness, i.e. make it more academic and cognitive. The other is to give states greater say over it while also holding them more accountable for its results.
The rationale for greater academic oomph is clear: many poor kids are behind the academic eight ball before they reach kindergarten and Head Start is the main federal program aimed at that urgent problem. Those who resist this change prefer the program's traditional focus on "child development." Just under the surface, however, is the fact that thousands of Head Start staffers aren't qualified to teach a more substantive curriculum and would either have to get themselves retrained and qualified (the House bill would eventually require at least a college degree) or risk losing their jobs.
The administration's rationale for greater state control is murkier, and the states haven't been much help in advancing it since (as is now their pattern in education bills) the governors are sitting on their hands, apparently not keen for greater flexibility or control. (Or maybe it's the added accountability they don't want.) So the bill's latest iteration puts severe limits on the state-control piece. [See "Head Start imbroglio a struggle for hearts, minds, votes," by Linda Jacobson, Education Week, June 18, 2003.]
This battle has also grown partisan. The bill now moving through the House is a Republican creation [See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=2#58 and http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=23#91 for more information.]. One might have expected the Democrats to mistrust the states, as is their pattern. It's less clear why they oppose the academic focus.
2. Funding NCLB
States ARE being heard from when it comes to paying for No Child Left Behind. They're bleating that the Administration and Congress haven't budgeted enough money to cover the added costs of complying with NCLB's various mandates for testing, accountability, qualified teachers, etc. Rival studies are cited as to what those costs will be?and whether they're matched by federal appropriations. Earlier this week, the dispute even made it onto NPR's "Morning Edition!"
Among the rival studies, I'll defer to the GAO, which says, in essence, that the dollars are sufficient so long as states stick to multiple-choice tests of reading and math. [For more information on the GAO study, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=22#115.] But only at the surface is this really an argument about funding. Any number of federal laws create costs that exceed their accompanying appropriations because, in any number of areas, Washington has decided that some specific change is good for the country and the heck with its cost. Environmental examples are numerous. Education examples abound in the civil rights field (the Brown decision was not accompanied by an appropriation!) and for disabled youngsters (IDEA).
NCLB, too, is not really about dollars. It's about reshaping fundamental practices of schools, districts, and states so that kids learn more. As the 2004 election nears, however, this, too, is becoming a dandy partisan issue as Democrats jockey to retrieve the "friend of education" medal from George W. Bush. One must ask, though, whether their friendship is to be tallied in dollars rather than evidence of children learning and schools becoming more effective.
3. Testing Teachers
If NCLB made anything clear, it's that U.S. public-school teachers are henceforth going to be tested for academic prowess as part of determining whether they're "highly qualified" for classroom posts. The questions now become which tests will be used, what their passing scores will be and whether a test will be tied to ed school attendance or used for competency based licensure that does not presuppose time spent in an "approved" preparation program.
Today's major teacher exams are the ETS-sponsored Praxis tests and various state-specific assessments, many of them crafted by National Evaluation Systems. The new kid on the block (with its first tests to debut in August) is the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE). (I'm involved with the latter.)
Praxis and many state-specific tests are heavy on pedagogy, thin on content, and generally hostile to the view that teachers possess knowledge and skills that children need to learn. In other words, they embrace the usual "progressive" assumptions about children as wild flowers (who bloom when and where they're ready, so one mustn't expect to cultivate them) and teachers as "guides on the side." ABCTE starts from the radically different premise that the teacher is the source of skills and knowledge that it is his/her job to impart to children--and that the teacher's subject-matter content knowledge trumps pedagogy every time.
The "progressive" establishment is naturally doing its best to strangle ABCTE in its crib. Last week, a ruckus arose as several newspapers disclosed that the head of the national ed-school association had somehow obtained a copy of ABCTE field-test questions and circulated them, thus compromising the questions and field-test results and causing delays and new test-development costs for ABCTE. House Education Committee chairman John Boehner demanded an investigation by the Education Department. [see House Education Committee press release, http://edworkforce.house.gov/press/press108/06jun/teachsabotage061203.htm, and also "Congress to probe teacher ed group and its president," by Julie Blair, Education Week, June 18, 2003.
Meanwhile, ETS announced several changes in Praxis (including setting a recommended passing-score for the first time) and forged a new alliance with the main ed-school accreditation group (NCATE).
In other words, the teacher preparation and testing powers that be are adapting to changed circumstances and responding to competition?while also trying to throttle their new rival. Their market share and monopoly position are at stake.
4. Evaluating Vouchers
Do vouchers work? In particular, do they enable needy children to move to schools where they learn more than similar children who don't move? We'll never know for sure until we try a proper large-scale, long-lasting voucher experiment, which has not yet occurred anywhere in America. But illuminating data have emerged from several smaller voucher experiments, paid for with private dollars, in New York, Washington, and Dayton. What lessons to draw from those data, however, is the subject of a big dispute.
Harvard's Paul Peterson and his colleagues concluded that moving to private schools with vouchers' help significantly boosted the test scores of black youngsters while having no significant effect on the academic performance of equally poor Hispanic and white kids. (Nobody has been able to explain that difference, though many conjectures have been offered.)
Princeton economist Paul Krueger and a colleague reanalyzed the same data, using different assumptions and analytic methods, and concluded that the vouchers had no significant effect on black students. [For the Gadfly's review of the Krueger report, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=18#215.]
Last week, Peterson & Co. responded, explaining why their original findings were correct and questioning some of Krueger's assumptions and methods. [For the study, go to http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/.]
On its face, this is an obscure academic squabble about statistical procedures and social science methods, the stuff of seminars and scholarly journals. Why, then, has it (twice) turned up at the National Press Club? Because its political and policy implications are immense. If vouchers are good for black kids and can help close America's most vexing achievement gap, there should be more of them. If they make no discernible difference, what's the point?
Where does this stand today? To repeat, far more comprehensive experimentation is needed before we'll know as much as (almost) everybody would like to know about the efficacy of vouchers as an education enhancer for poor children. As regards the New York (and Washington and Dayton) data, however, the Peterson team is ahead by a nose. Their critics (including Krueger) are now disputing the "robustness" of their findings rather than the existence of evidence that low-income black children benefit from attending private schools. [see "Report defends vouchers, but fails to quell debate," by Sam Dillon, New York Times, June 13, 2003.
The significance of these four struggles? Education change is at war with inertia. New ideas seek to displace old. Many interests hang in the balance. It's good, once in a while, to remind ourselves that these ought to include the interests of children, not just grownups.
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Recommended Reading
A grand bargain on teacher pay?
Matthew Miller thinks he's got the answer to teacher shortages in America's toughest schools?and maybe he does, since he's brought to the table both teacher union president Sandra Feldman and Fordham president Chester Finn. In the July 2003 Atlantic Monthly, Miller proposes a deal: the federal government would commit $30 billion per year to raise the salaries of teachers in the nation's toughest schools by 50 percent. In return, these teachers would agree to abandon lockstep pay scales and make it easier to fire incompetent teachers. Miller calls it "Title I for Teachers," and AFT head Feldman?among other union leaders?said she could sign on. To gauge the reaction of reformers, Miller approached the Gadfly's own Finn, who responded with another version that would two-track the compensation system: higher pay for teachers who are willing to give up some job security but not for those unwilling to take that risk. The remaining sticking point: how to measure teacher performance? By increases in student achievement? The judgment of principals and peers? Some sort of blended approach? There are, of course, myriad details to be worked out?and political will to be mustered?before any such plan is rendered plausible. But it's a start.
"A new deal for teachers," by Matthew Miller, Atlantic Monthly, July 2003 (not available online)
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Accountability rollback in CA
Last month a study predicted that 20 percent of California's class of 2004 may fail the state's high school exit exam due to inadequate preparation. (This despite the fact that students have eight chances to pass it; almost half have already done so.) In response, the state's schools chief has cancelled the July administration of the test and is recommending that the state board of education delay until 2006 the requirement making passage of the test a pre-requisite for graduation. Thus our largest state joins the shameful bandwagon of those that adopt standards (often none too ambitious to start with) and tests and consequences but then quietly back away when the consequences begin to inconvenience people. [See "Resist urge to "refine" graduation testing," ADD LINK FROM LAST WEEK'S EDITORIAL.] That it's possible to resist these pressures is evident in a few states such as Massachusetts and Virginia. Will California's state board also have the backbone to stick with standards-based education?
"Schools chief cancels July test," by Erika Chavez and Bill Lindelof, Sacramento Bee, June 14, 2003
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Are charter changes coming to CA?
Two bills before the California legislature would, if enacted, dramatically improve the prospects of the charter school movement in that state. AB 1137, which passed the Assembly on June 5 and is now before a Senate committee, requires charter authorizers to ensure that the schools they oversee comply with specified reporting requirements and meet at least one of several objective academic performance criteria to receive a charter renewal. AB 1464, currently stalled in the Assembly, would extend charter-authorizing power to colleges and universities, mayors and, in some cases, nonprofit organizations. [To see Gadfly's earlier coverage of this bill, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=22#117.] These two bills tackle what the Fordham Foundation's recent evaluation of state charter authorizers ["Charter School Authorizing: Are States Making the Grade?" at found to be two of the most troublesome obstacles to successful charter schools in California: relying on local school districts for authorizing, despite their aversion to charter schools; and accountability provisions for charters that are overly subjective and ambiguous.
"Crucial legislation: charter schools, AB 1137," editorial, San Jose Mercury News, June 15, 2003
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Is history, history?
An unintended consequence of the No Child Left Behind Act is that, due to the pressure to boost pupil achievement in reading, math, and science (the subjects tested under the federal law), schools are neglecting other valuable subjects, not least of which are history, civics, and geography?aka "social studies." Maryland, for example, no longer mandates assessments in history and social studies in elementary and middle schools nor does it include these subjects in statewide curriculum standards. Will NCLB lead to the end of history? It shouldn't. It only sets minimum requirements for receiving federal aid. Districts and states are supposed to augment these.
"There's wisdom in teaching knowledge with reading," by Karin Chenoweth, The Washington Post, June 5, 2003
"History and social studies education in Maryland, a cause for concern," by Margaret R. Burke, Ph.D., April 22, 2003
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Teach for America caught in AmeriCorps cuts
This week, the national service program AmeriCorps announced that it has been forced to make drastic cuts in its grant programs, due to past-year overruns and a continuing impasse on how it accounts for the education awards earned by members. (Corps members receive a stipend and an award of up to $4,725 that can be used to pay for college or to pay back student loans, in exchange for service through a nonprofit organization.) After October 1, enrollments could plummet as low as 12,000, from the 50,000 originally projected by AmeriCorps officials. A number of education organizations would be hit hard, including literacy programs for low-income, rural, and tribal communities; after-school programs; and youth mentoring groups. Among them is Teach for America (TFA), which will place 3,200 college graduates in elementary and secondary classrooms this fall. Since TFA launched in 1990, all 9,000 participants have received AmeriCorps education awards, which many use to pay for further coursework to become certified. TFA official Kevin Huffman told the Gadfly that the program is bracing itself for the unprecedented situation of being unable to offer members an education award?and that TFA's board is considering costly alternatives, including covering the awards through private donations. "This is potentially pretty devastating," said Huffman. "These members made a commitment and they may well find themselves without the education benefit they expected when they signed up."
"AmeriCorps announces major cuts," by Brian Faler, Washington Post, June 17, 2003
"AmeriCorps will cut its staff and its spending," by Christopher Marquis, New York Times, June 16, 2003
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Short Reviews
High School Issue Papers: For Youth and Adult Groups Organizing to Transform High School Education in the United States
In an effort to refocus attention on high schools?"the weakest link in a troubled education system"?the reform group Research for Democracy compiled this series of short essays on high school reform. Though their recommendations and research are not earth shattering, they underscore the need for higher standards and increased accountability for student achievement and teacher quality. In addition, the report helps focus attention on the importance of setting clear, consistent standards for student and teacher behavior and discipline. Finally, the essays provide a list of useful resources for parents, teachers, and community leaders seeking to move the ball forward on high school reform. You can download the entire report or individual essays at http://www.temple.edu/cpp/hs_issue_papers.htm.
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Performance-Driven Budgeting: The Example of New York City's Schools
Dorothy Siegel, ERIC Digest 168
May 2003
This digest offers a quick overview of research supporting school-based management practices, based mainly on the author's study of former chancellor Rudy Crew's Performance Driven Budgeting (PDB) initiative in New York City (see http://www.nyu.edu/iesp/publications/pdb/PDB_final_rpt.pdffor that study). Following experiments in Edmonton and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, New York in 1997 instituted a pilot of PDB in 61 schools. They were given greater autonomy over their budgets and instructional plans, with the aim of aligning the two to boost student achievement. It seems to have helped. Siegel finds a "small, but statistically significant, increase in student academic outcomes" for PDB schools. That's striking when you recall that PDB did not give schools full control over staffing decisions. Imagine what might happen if districts went allowed principals to make their own personnel decisions. Of course, New York has since moved in the opposite direction?toward greater centralization?and the PDB experiment has ended. But these results should serve as evidence that empowering school leaders is one good route to educational improvement. To read the digest, visit http://eric.uoregon.edu/publications/digests/digest168.html.
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Research Perspectives on School Reform: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
March 2003
I suppose we will forever see fresh efforts to evaluate and learn from--and spin--the effects of the "Annenberg Challenge," the multifaceted efforts undertaken after 1993 to reform public education with the help of Ambassador Walter Annenberg's munificent half-billion dollar gift. The latest such effort is this 130-page collection of seven studies, compiled and published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. (Given its source, you can safely assume it isn't going to be super-critical!) This is a topic we have addressed before, both in the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's own three-city appraisal [http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=41] and in reporting on prior efforts by the Annenberg folks to reflect on their experiences. [for Gadfly's coverage, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/issues/index.cfm?topic=22.] The central difficulty in evaluating the Annenberg Challenge is that it took so many different forms. Just about all they had in common was their insistence on changing the public-school system itself (rather than, say, competing with it or creating alternatives to it) and their reliance on "intermediary organizations" for this purpose. This means the specific strategies employed in one city differed greatly from those in the next city, making it impossible to generalize. This volume seeks to adduce lessons from half a dozen sites (Boston, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami) plus an arts-based strategy. Think of it as a collection of case studies by sympathetic but often perceptive participant/observers. It's the sort of collection that leaves the overview piece (by Brenda Turnbull of Policy Studies Associates) using phrases like "neither created nor validated simple recipes for reform" and "experiences are rich in lessons." In other words, it's classic "qualitative" education research, often interesting but ultimately inconclusive. That's not a bad summary of the Annenberg Challenge itself. You can find it at http://www.annenbergchallenge.org/pubs/index.html#chapters.
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Teaching Children to Read: The Fragile Links Between Science and Federal Education Policy
Gregory Camilli and others, National Institute for Early Education
The "reading wars" continue, but at an ever more technical level. This new report (published online as part of the "Education Policy Analysis Archives") was written by Gregory Camilli and colleagues at the National Institute for Early Education Research. This is a deeply technical paper, using the evaluation method known as "meta-analysis," which seeks to re-examine the studies that the National Reading Panel (NRP) relied upon in its influential report three years ago. (Camilli & Co. ended up discarding one of those studies and adding a few more.) Most readers (myself included) will find it heavy going. Notwithstanding the misleading title given this piece by EPAA custodians, the basic conclusion is that the National Reading Panel was essentially correct when it said "systematic phonics" is an important element of early reading instruction but (says Camilli and team) it's considerably more powerful when used in conjunction with individual tutoring and what are ambiguously termed "language activities." (Those appear to be the sorts of things long favored by "whole language" advocates.) In the end, this paper seems to me to strengthen the reading consensus that is proving to be one of the most robust findings of education research: phonics is very important for nearly every child in learning to read, but a diet of pure phonics would leave anybody malnourished. Indeed, veteran educators often point out that phonics, properly taught, gets internalized and automated during first grade, much as a child learns to balance his two-wheeler without thinking about it. Thereafter, he can go to interesting places on his bike. In education, once phonics has been internalized, student and teacher can go on to use these skills for rewarding reading activities, calling upon the skills as needed but barely having to think about them. To repeat, this particular report is heavy going. You might do better to read George Archibald's excellent Washington Times article. You can find the report at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n15/ and Archibald's piece at http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030610-125708-5569r.htm.
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The Performance of California Charter Schools
Margaret E. Raymond, CREDO, Hoover Institution at Stanford University
May 2003
Though California has had charter schools for almost a decade, little research has examined their impact on student achievement. This new report from Stanford's Center for Research on Educational Outcomes attempts to fill that void by comparing charter schools and traditional public schools on two dimensions. The first is a school's Academic Performance Index (API), a weighted average of scores earned by students on standardized exams in grades 3-11. The second is gain scores: average student achievement increases from one year to the next. The bottom line is that charter students are performing slightly below students as a whole but are ahead in year-to-year gains. Raymond found that, when the average API for charter schools was compared against the average API for all traditional public schools (including districts with high performing public schools and no charters, which often don't have students who are demographically comparable to districts with charters), the charters' API is slightly lower though not statistically significant. When it comes to gain scores, though, Raymond found that charter high schools show statistically significant year-to-year gains compared to their public school counterparts (elementary schools also show greater year-to-year gains, though these are not statistically significant). As Raymond notes, the pool of charters includes many new schools that are "experiencing all the disruption of starting a new enterprise." So the fact that they are doing as well or better than their traditional public school counterparts "raises interesting questions about their longer run performance." Read it for yourself at http://credo.stanford.edu/Performance%20of%20California%20Charter%20School.FINAL.complete.pdf.
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About Us
The Education Gadfly is published weekly (ordinarily on Thursdays), with occasional breaks, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Regular contributors include Amy Fagan, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Kyle Kennedy, Mickey Muldoon, Jamie Davies O’Leary, Eric Osberg, Stafford Palmieri, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Terry Ryan, Janie Scull, Saul Spady, and Amber Winkler. Have something to say? Email us at thegadfly@edexcellence.net. Would you like to be spared from the Gadfly? Email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with “unsubscribe gadfly” in the text of your message. You are welcome to forward Gadfly to others, and from our website you can also email individual articles. If you have been forwarded a copy of Gadfly and would like to subscribe, you may either email thegadfly@edexcellence.net with “subscribe gadfly” in the text of the message or sign up online here.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a nonprofit organization that conducts research, issues publications, and directs action projects in elementary and secondary education reform at the national level and in Ohio, with a special emphasis on our hometown of Dayton. (For Ohio news, check out our Ohio Education Gadfly, published bi-weekly, ordinarily on Wednesdays.) The Institute is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.
