The Education Gadfly
A Weekly Bulletin of News and Analysis from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
July 16, 2009, Volume 9, Number 25
This week on The Education Gadfly Show Podcast: Richard Lee Colvin, in the house
Contents
From Mike's Desk
Recommended Reading
Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
- Education Change Agent: Alex Johnston, CEO, ConnCAN
- DC voucher program saga turns into DC rights issue
The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Short Reviews
- Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress
- Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement
- Still Left Behind: Student learning in Chicago
- The Cartel
Announcements
From Mike's Desk
Sarah Palin, anti-intellectualism, and the plight of the liberal arts
"She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why."
--Peggy Noonan, "Farewell to Harms," Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2009
It's well known that feelings about Sarah Palin tend to run from red hot to ice cold, and for her supporters, statements like the one above are to be dismissed as ugly, unfair caricatures, developed at the hands of the liberal media and their acolytes of Beltway and Manhattan insiders.
And those supporters might be right. I've never met Sarah Palin; I don't know for sure how her mind works, or what she's read, or how thoughtful she might be. Like most Americans, all I know is what I've seen on television, in her speeches, debates, and interviews. Based on all of that, Noonan's characterization seems plausible.
But here's why it matters: There are lots of people in America who never learn "how the other sides think, or why." And that's a big problem for our country, and one that's likely only to grow worse as our education policies focus obsessively on making young people "college and career ready," the mantra repeated constantly by government officials, major foundations, and policy pundits across the political spectrum.
Sarah Palin was ready for college (five of them in fact). She was ready for a career (in the demanding commercial fisheries industry). But is that enough? Is it enough for any of our young people, even if they don't plan to run for higher office? Don't they need to be ready for citizenship, too? Doesn't preparation for citizenship entail learning the lessons of generations before us, by understanding the history of our country and the rest of the world; gaining insights from great works of literature; appreciating the potential of human creativity through exposure to majestic masterpieces of art and music; and engaging in the issues of the day so that we might all understand "how the other sides think"? Don't we want "thoughtful" people, not just ones "ready" for college and career?
There was a time when conservatives, Republicans even, valued candidates who could demonstrate mastery of subjects like history, geography, and political philosophy. As David Brooks wrote last fall, "Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals... conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind." These conservatives also stood up for the idea of a liberally educated populace.
Yet, explains Brooks, over the past fifteen years, Republican politicians, pundits, and talk show hosts have split the country between "wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland" and "the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts." In doing so, they repudiated some of the best aspects of modern conservatism, and paved the way for populist candidates like Palin.
And not surprisingly, says Brooks, this strategy has driven well-educated voters away from the GOP in droves. It also makes it nearly impossible for the Republican Party to be the standard-bearer for a rigorous education, as it seems uninterested in demanding such an education even for its candidates.
This ought to create opportunities for the left and the Democratic Party--to argue for a broad, rich, full curriculum, and to ensure that the next version of No Child Left Behind makes such a reality more likely in our nation's schools. Yet to my knowledge the group "Liberals for the Liberal Arts" has yet to be founded. Democratic reformers seem just as enamored with the utilitarian and narrow drive toward "college and work readiness" as their Republican counterparts, if not more so.
Consider the Obama Administration. One might think that a government led by a professorial, and yes, thoughtful President, who is so talented at demonstrating that he knows "how the other sides think" and who himself was fortunate to receive an excellent education, might be a natural advocate for the liberal arts. Yet Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his team are mute on the topic.
Take a look at Duncan's speeches. Over the past six months, he's made nine major policy addresses that have been posted on his Department's web site. And in those speeches, he's mentioned "history," "literature," and "geography" exactly zero times. Meanwhile, there were seven instances of "accountability," and "charter schools" left his lips an astounding twenty-nine times.
Duncan and his team are pushing for structural changes in the system; they, like most reformers these days, are ignoring the "stuff" of education--what students actually need to learn in order to become good Americans.
This is because the left remains uncomfortable saying that there is a body of knowledge that all young people need to master in order to be prepared for life in our democracy. They fear getting pulled into debates about which books students should read, which countries' histories are worth putting it the curriculum. Look what's happened to E.D. Hirsch. Here's a bona fide liberal arguing that poor kids need to gain "cultural literacy" through exposure to the liberal arts, and he lives with charges of racism as a result.
But these Democratic reformers had better be careful. An obsessive focus on nothing but basic skills in reading and math, which can be chopped into little bits of data with which we can make all manner of decisions, will result in a generation of students who will make Palin sound like Socrates.
So that's where we find ourselves today. We have a Republican Party that continues to celebrate anti-intellectualism in its candidates and in American life. And we have a Democratic Party, increasingly led and dominated by well-educated individuals, that is unwilling to stand up for a broad, liberal education for all.
In this case, there's little need to understand how the "other side" thinks, because both parties are on the same side: The wrong side.
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Recommended Reading
Buckeye State sell out
The dust has finally settled on a long and contentious legislative battle over education reform in Ohio. For the most part, Governor Ted Strickland's plan prevailed; we were critics from the beginning and the muddy mess that is the final budget bill proves our fears were warranted. When the budget's provisions take effect (some immediately, some ten years down the road), Ohio's school funding system will be little more than a laundry list of staffing and programmatic mandates; the state's academic content standards will reflect an unholy marriage of core content with so-called 21st Century Skills; and the state's few bright spots of successful urban education will have been cut off at the knees. (To be fair, the governor got at least a few things right, like reforming teacher tenure and retention policies.) Ironically, what the governor calls "a comprehensive plan to build our education system anew" doesn't fix the one problem he set out to solve in the first place: making the state's school-funding system "constitutional" (the state's Supreme Court has four times ruled against it). State Senator Bill Seitz may have said it best: "He's created a new, unfunded funding system. It's ironic as hell that a budget that gives less funding to school than the last seven budgets is being cast as a constitutional funding bill. That's funny. That's just funny." We're not laughing.
"Strickland promotes ed reform here," by Ben Fischer, Cincinnati Enquirer, July 14, 2009
"Worse than usual," editorial, Columbus Dispatch, July 15, 2009
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The Big Four?
With the Big Three in and out of the red, it seems bankruptcy is the new black in Detroit. Who's got the bug? Detroit Public Schools, whose emergency financial manager is contemplating addressing its $259.5 million-dollar deficit for 2009-2010 by filing "Chapter 9." The politically-elected school board and the local teachers' union are unsurprisingly aghast. For example, the president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, Keith Johnson, says, "In the worst case scenario it could completely void an existing collective bargaining agreement." But that sounds like a best-case scenario to us; one reason Motown finds itself in this predicament is that generations of school leaders have put the needs of adults over those of children. Moreover, for a district with such abysmal achievement, shady financial practices, and political corruption, a fresh start might not be such a bad idea. Bankruptcies are never pretty, but they can allow for new beginnings.
"DPS moves closer to bankruptcy," by Maria Schultz, The Detroit News, July 10, 2009
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Prime time for Kline
The Republican Party's adventures with Big Government Conservatism might be coming to an end, at least with respect to education policymaking. Representative John Kline of Minnesota is now the ranking minority member of the House Education and Labor committee, and seems eager to rethink NCLB from top to bottom. "I'm not looking to tweak No Child Left Behind," he told the Washington Post. "As far as I'm concerned, we ought to go in and look at the whole thing." This makes Dan Lips of the Heritage Foundation very happy, who sees this as "an opportunity for Republicans to return to their more conservative roots, favoring moving decisions back to states." Of course, House Republicans have about the same ability to stop Democrats in Congress as Andy Roddick has to stop Roger Federer. (We know it was close at All England, but the Swiss Missile has still won eighteen out of their twenty career matches.) Still, Kline might have an ally of sorts in Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who recently promised Kline that he'd push for higher standards but also wants to be "much looser at the local level, let folks innovate." That's not a bad formulation; it sounds an awful lot like the "Reform Realism" we at Fordham have been promoting for federal education policy. Now, if Duncan could go realist in all his endeavors, we'd be making some progress.
"GOP Leaving 'No Child' Behind," by Nick Anderson, The Washington Post, July 13, 2009
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Drafting the best teachers
And then there was meritocracy. When then-State Education Commissioner Peter McWalters ordered Providence, Rhode Island to abandon seniority hiring and firing practices in that city's schools, we applauded. Now, his replacement, Deborah Gist, has completed the policy's pass to Providence supe, Tom Brady. Though the Providence Teachers Union (PTU) seems poised to block the end zone with a suit for breach of contract, six schools in the Renaissance City are already interviewing teaching candidates. McWalters thought, and Gist agrees, that seniority policies were preventing schools from matching teachers to schools that were the best fit. But PTU president Steve Smith says, "We want experience to count for something. This is all about control. We want a partnership." Well, he's right about control, since the PTU just lost quite a bit of it; the new policies basically negate the union contract. But as for experience and partnership, both are accounted for: The interview and hiring process will include a panel of teachers, school leaders (i.e., a department head), and the principal, and require uniform procedures that discourage favoritism. Since the practice of hiring candidates based on their merits was so foreign, the committees were trained extensively by The New Teacher Project. Likewise, teacher-applicants were so unfamiliar with having to demonstrate their worth to get a job that the district held cover-letter-writing and resume-formatting seminars. And teachers are lining up around the block for interviews. Sounds like Superintendent Tom Brady is having a good preseason.
"Providence schools implement new approach to hiring," by Linda Borg, Providence Journal, July 13, 2009
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Flypaper's Finest (The best from Flypaper, Fordham's blog)
Education Change Agent: Alex Johnston, CEO, ConnCAN
The Education Gadfly
Alex Johnston is Chief Executive Officer of the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN). As ConnCAN's first employee, Alex launched what is now regarded as one of the nation's leading state-level education reform organizations. In the five years since, he has led ConnCAN's effort to advocate for state policies that will ensure every Connecticut child has access to a great public school. So far in 2009 ConnCAN has achieved two major legislative victories through its 'Mind the Gaps' campaign...Read it here.
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DC voucher program saga turns into DC rights issue
Stafford Palmieri
As Andy reported last Friday, the DC Council has sent a letter to Secretary Duncan urging him to reconsider the fate of the DC Opportunity Scholarship program. What's interesting is that the issue is picking up additional hints of the long running "taxation without representation" debate that has surrounded DC's disenfranchised state. Currently, the District has no voting representation in Congress, only a (non-voting) delegate to the House of Representatives. The Wall Street Journal explains: The D.C. Council's letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level...Read it here.
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The Education Gadfly Show Podcast
Richard Lee Colvin, in the house
This week, Mike and Rick discuss the ascent of Representative Kline to ranking minority leader on the House Committee on Education and Labor, Detroit Public Schools' dance with bankruptcy, and Duncan's emphasis on structural reforms. (And special guest Richard Lee Colvin is, actually, in the house--though he's also "in the house.") Amber breaks down a new study on old NAEP data that looks at black-white achievement gaps and Rate that Reform talks guns in schools. Click here to listen through our website and peruse past editions. To download the show as an mp3 to your computer, click here (no iPod required--this link will play through any music software on your computer, including Windows Media Player or RealPlayer).
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Short Reviews
Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress
Alan Vanneman, Linda Hamilton, Janet B. Anderson, and Taslima Rahman
National Center for Education Statistics
July 2009
This report feeds the education community's enduring obsession with the achievement gap by re-slicing 2004 and 2007 NAEP data to look at black-white disparities on both national and state levels. It repackages some of the 2007 race and ethnicity subgroup data for fourth and eighth graders and supplements it with similar data from the long-term NAEP 2004 trend (LTT) assessment. (Remember, the main NAEP test and NAEP LTT data are not the same; we explain why here.) The good news is that math scores for both black and white students in both grades are higher than on any previous LTT assessment (going back to 1978) and on any previous main NAEP assessment (going back to 1990). Reading saw similar progress for both groups in both grades, too, though the LTT data start a bit later (1980). The unsurprising news is that white students, on average, tend to have much higher scores than black students on all assessments. So, while gaps narrowed significantly in both grades on math and in fourth grade reading, white students nonetheless had average scores that were at least 26 points higher (on a 0-500 point scale) than black students in each subject. (Wisconsin, Nebraska, and D.C. posted some of the biggest gaps in both subjects, while Delaware and New Jersey narrowed them in reading and Arkansas and Texas narrowed them in math.) Though there are many ways for gaps to narrow--including, for example, the higher achieving group declining--the narrowing of these four gaps (fourth grade math and reading and eighth grade math and reading) were the result of gains for black students. A report on the white-Hispanic achievement gap is to be released next year. Find the report, including state-level results, here.
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Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement
Jesse Rothstein
Princeton University and National Bureau of Economic Research
February 2010 (anticipated)
There's a very serious and scholarly--and to the lay person, nearly unintelligible--exchange happening between academic economists these days on the topic of Value-Added Models (VAM), which rate teacher performance based on student test score gains, rather than snapshots of achievement. In theory, the idea works as follows: Randomly assign students to classrooms such that their average test scores are comparable, and then at the end of the year, give a higher VAM grade to the teachers whose students' test results rise the most. The problem is that, in reality, students are not (and should not be) randomly assigned to teachers--and statistically compensating for this fact turns out to be enormously tricky. As proof, Rothstein breaks down three real-life examples of VAM and applies them to a much larger student sample (approximately 90,000 pupils) than that for which they are typically used. By doing so, he shows that statistical problems that could be hidden in acceptable margins of error in a small sample size are actually larger--and problematic--trends when applied to many more students. While his peers evaluate and reformulate their models based on these findings, it is both reassuring and frightening that the topic has entered the arcana of high economics: reassuring, because there is honest and rigorous debate happening on behalf of better performance measures for our schools, and frightening, because someday someone's going to have to translate these models into terms that teachers and principals can digest. One thing's for sure: Rothstein's cautious recommendation to both include observational data as well as VAM scores in overall teacher evaluation should be taken seriously. Read it here.
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Still Left Behind: Student learning in Chicago
Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago
June 2009
It's hard to quibble when a paper opens thusly: "Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail." That's the main point (and the first point) that this paper, an annual report on the state of Chicago's schools, hopes to drive home. Though Chicago Public Schools has been all back-patting and positive press releases about incredible gains made in the last decade, the Civic Committee is here to set the record straight. Those gains were made in the elementary grades only, they explain, while high schools have stagnated or declined. And, though the elementary scores have improved, much of the gains can be attributed to a new state test, easier cut scores, and lower standards that were implemented from Springfield in 2006. According to CPS, composite third through eighth grade scores in both math and reading on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) jumped from 38.4 percent meeting or exceeding proficiency in 2004 to 65.4 percent in 2008. In eighth grade math alone, scores jumped from 33 percent in 2004 to 70 percent in 2008. To discover how much of these gains is due to actual increases in learning as opposed to testing changes, the Committee compared Chicago scores to state-wide scores. They averaged the state-wide gains and subtracted them from Chicago's gains, thus neutralizing the effects of testing and standards changes. The results are sobering: Adjusted composite ISAT scores for grades three through eight in reading and math went from 27.5 percent in 2004 to 32.1 percent in 2008. That's hardly the 25 point gain broadcast by CPS; while Springfield was transparent about lowering standards they thought were too high, CPS continues to promote these incredible gains as authentic. In fact, when we looked at 2003 and 2006 ISAT scores in our Proficiency Illusion IL state report, we found that that state's cut scores, especially in math, were lowered substantially in that time period. The Civics Committee report has garnered attention because the CEO of CPS in recent years was none other than now-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. When Obama announced his appointment, the significant gains made by Chicago students were one of his selling points; this study casts serious doubt on those figures. The Civics Committee thinks the solution is an external auditor to rigorously evaluate student achievement. Meanwhile, this report is definitely worth a read (and there are tons more bleak data inside, especially on high schools), though it might make you want to cry. Read it here.
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The Cartel
Bob Bowdon, director
Bowdon Media
Spring 2009
This documentary film isn't about drugs. In fact, there's almost no violence involved. And its antagonists are funded by your tax dollars. You probably even have a friend who's part of what filmmaker Bob Bowdon calls "the cartel"--the existing educational structure that he claims quells outside competition and is disgustingly wasteful with its resources. Bowdon, the film's director and producer, is a former television anchor, who gave up real news to report fake news over at The Onion. And he's surely used his funny-man skills to provide an entertaining two hours. You'll take off on a roller coaster ride through many popular and contentious issues (like teachers' unions, school funding, and charters) and some less-talked-about topics (like administrative waste, childhood illiteracy, and political patronage). But since it covers so much ground, the film never really digs deeper than a few feet into any of its subject matter. Interviews are cut short (Fordham's own Checker Finn gets his two sentences at around the 39-minute mark) and (strangely inarticulate) defenders of the status quo are left little time to respond. Further, though the film's focus is New Jersey and its host of education dysfunctions, Bowdon doesn't adequately demonstrate how the lessons to be learned from these shenanigans can be applied nationally. That doesn't mean the film isn't full of compelling local stories--tales of porn-watching teachers, eighth-grade-math-challenged security guard applicants, disappearing construction dollars, and sky-high teacher evaluation competency rates for teachers--that help bolster his argument that, at least in New Jersey (though probably in your home state, too), there are many weeds to be killed. Watch the trailer here.
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Announcements
Save the date: With charters up, are vouchers down and out?
Every other word coming out of Secretary Duncan's mouth these days seems to be "charter school," so now we're wondering, "With charter schools ascendant, is there still a future for vouchers?" Join us for a panel discussion on that very question, August 19 from 4 to 5:30 pm. RSVP to Amy Fagan at rsvp@edexcellence.net.
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NCTQ is hiring
The National Council on Teacher Quality is looking to hire a project manager and several research analysts. The former should have professional experience juggling multiple projects and will oversee numerous people (a number that may increase considerably with time); they should be able to handle a fast-paced work environment and strict deadlines, but need not have any experience with education policy. The ideal research analyst, on the other hand, should have a deep interest in education policy and stellar academic records in college and/or grad school. He or she also needs to pay serious attention to detail, demonstrate superior quantitative and analytical skills, and being able to work fast--superfast--amongst other things. More information is available here and inquiries should be directed to Pat Giles at pgiles@nctq.org.
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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 Jack Byers, Amy Fagan, Daniela Fairchild, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Mickey Muldoon, Jamie Davies O'Leary, Eric Osberg, Stafford Palmieri, Emmy Partin, Michael J. Petrilli, Laura Elizabeth Pohl, Terry Ryan, Janie Scull, and Amber Winkler. Have something to say? Email us at thegadfly@edexcellence.net. If you 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/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.