The Education Gadfly Weekly

Education Week
January 5, 2005

Education Week unveiled their 2005 edition of Quality Counts yesterday. Their annual state-by-state review of educational quality this year features "financing better schools," offering a tally of school spending hot topics like "equity and adequacy" in spending, allocation of funds per-pupil, achievement-based teacher pay incentives, and how states find the money to pay for their education costs (local taxes, lottery, etc.). Tucked neatly behind these pages, as always, are complete state-by-state report cards on more state education topics, including standards and accountability--coincidentally the very same day Fordham released its reviews of state math and English academic standards (see http://www.edexcellence.net/template/page.cfm?id=276). At first glance, it appears very simple to compare Ed Week's grades to our own, however the Ed Week study has some major differences. The standards (which were, in truth, graded by the AFT in a yet-to-be released report) only comprise a portion (40%) of the grade for each state and look more widely at four core subject areas (math, English, social studies/history, and science). Fordham grades are based entirely on the clarity, specificity, and content of the academic standards in math and English - the only two subjects currently influenced by NCLB - so please, compare with care. Stay tuned to this spot for more on the comparisons between Quality Counts and The State of State Standards: Math and English. To read the rest of Quality Counts, click here.

Achieve, Inc.
2004

This short report from Achieve follows up on last year's American Diploma Project, which exposed shortcomings in high school graduation standards in relation to what's needed to succeed in college or the workplace. In diagnosing why this gap exists, Achieve now points (in part) to weak coursework expectations in most states. Though every student should receive four years each of grade-level English and math, few states meet either standard. (Notable exceptions include Arkansas, Indiana, and Texas.) Achieve also offers a variety of suggestions to states, including "model" curricula; better guidance on course content (as California has done via checklists of requirements for university admission); and incentives for students to take weightier course-loads. And in case anyone should doubt the value of a rigorous curriculum, it cites some interesting data: black students entering college with at least Algebra II under their belts increase their chances of completing college from 45 to 75 percent, and Latino students' odds rise from 61 to 79 percent. Achieve also notes that San Jose now requires all students to take the curriculum required to attend the U.C. system - and has seen its black students' test scores rise dramatically with no increase in dropout rates. True, states aren't the only actors - parents, for example, might also press their kids to take tougher courses - but if we expect all students to succeed in life then surely we must ensure that their school curricula reflect those expectations. You can read the report, including a mapping of each state's requirements, here.

Public Agenda
November 16, 2004

This Public Agenda study, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, reports on children's "out-of-school time" activities and what the consumers of these activities (parents included) expect them to accomplish. Not surprisingly, many believe that quality organized activities - no matter if sports-, academic-, or hobby-centered - will help kids stay out of trouble. However, fewer than half of low-income parents report adequate access to high-quality options, vs. two-thirds of upper-income families. More surprising, poor families are also likelier to look for programs that focus on academics rather than sports or hobbies (45 percent vs. 35 percent upper-income). The study explores a wide range of topics from both parents' and kids' perspectives and, on top of income and race disparities in after-school programs, reveals a scary disconnect between what parents think their kids are doing in their free time and what the girls and boys are actually up to. To read on, click here.

We've heard plenty about the outsourcing of American jobs to "Asian Tiger" economies and about the swell of graduate students from other countries (India especially) coming to the U.S. to take high-tech and research positions. While politicians have proposed all sorts of bogus fixes to this supposed problem, few want to look at one awkward cause: the high value that many residents of these countries place on rigorous education for their children - even if they must pay for it themselves. The Financial Times reports that in India, attendance at unregulated, unrecognized private schools is booming among the poor. (Private schooling has long boomed among the prosperous.) These schools, populated by the sons and daughters of rickshaw drivers and laborers, are popular because of committed teachers (India's state-run schools suffer from chronic teacher absenteeism) and because they instruct in English, seen as the passport to economic mobility. The schools are forced to bribe state inspectors to stay in business since they can't possibly comply with India's absurd school laws, which regulate everything from the size of playgrounds to the space between students' desks. Yet parents are willing to spend the equivalent of hundreds of dollars a year in tuition for private schooling in a country where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. British researcher James Tooley has also written extensively on this topic (read more here) and will publish a book on international private schooling for the poor (funded in part by a small grant from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation) this summer.

"A fortune at the bottom of the pyramid," by Edward Luce, Financial Times, January 3, 2005 (subscription required)

As Checker Finn noted last month, "the NEXT BIG THING in education reform is a serious focus on high school." (Click here for more.) Among the bipartisan chorus calling for high school reform are a few who ascribe America's staggering college drop-out problem to inadequacies in the high schools. According to Richard Colvin, "nearly six in 10 high school graduates in 2005 will start college in the fall, but half of them-and more than two-thirds of the African American and Latino students who enroll-will fail to earn either an associate's or bachelor's degree." That's not surprising, given the vast numbers of high school graduates needing remediation once they enter college. Colvin reports that the Cal State University system required an astonishing 58 percent of its first-year students this year to take remedial courses in reading, math, or both. Virginia Governor Mark Warner, this year's chair of the National Governors Association (NGA), has made strengthening high schools the top priority of that group. In February, NGA plans to hold an education summit that will include the release of a "top 10 list" of what David Broder calls "relatively easy and inexpensive steps that states can take to begin the process of improving high schools." And, of course, the Bush administration has signaled that its second term education goal is to extend standards-based reform and accountability through high school. But, as Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, Inc. notes, merely testing students isn't enough. "The details and design [of the test] matter immensely. There is a need to increase rigor and increase expectations." Let's hope the feds heed the warning.

"Congratulations! You're about to fail," by Richard Colvin, Los Angeles Times, January 2, 2005 (registration required)

"The next school reform," by David Broder, Washington Post, January 2, 2004

"No child heading off to high school," by Robert Dodge, Dallas Morning News, January 2, 2005 (registration required)

Two decades after being diagnosed as "a nation at risk," academic standards for U.S. primary and secondary schools are more important than ever-and the quality of those standards matters enormously.

In 1983, as nearly every American knows, the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared that "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people." Test scores were falling, schools were asking less of students, international rankings were slipping, colleges and employers were complaining, and too many high school graduates were semi-literate. America was gripped by an education crisis centering on weak academic achievement in its K-12 schools. Though that weakness had myriad causes, it quickly occurred to policymakers, business leaders and astute educators that the surest cure would begin by spelling out the skills and knowledge that children ought to learn in school, i.e. setting standards against which progress could be tracked, performance be judged, and curricula (and textbooks, teacher training, etc.) be aligned. Indeed, the vast education renewal movement that gathered speed in the mid 1980's quickly came to be known as "standards-based reform."

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush and the governors agreed on ambitious new national academic goals, including the demand that "By the year 2000, American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography."

In response, states began to spell out academic standards for their schools and students. In 1994, Washington added momentum via the "Goals 2000" act and a revision of the Title I program that asked every state to set standards and track student and school progress in relation to them.

Two years later, governors and business leaders convened an education summit to map out a plan to strengthen K-12 academic achievement. The summiteers called for "new world-class standards" for U.S. schools. "Too often," said then-Nevada governor Bob Miller, "we seem too willing to accept underachieving standards suitable only for a Beavis, a Butt-head, or a Bart Simpson. The nation's governors and CEOs are fed up with passive acceptance of mediocrity."

By 1997, 28 states had outlined standards in core subjects and we at the Fordham Foundation took it upon ourselves to find out whether they were any good. That year we published State English Standards, our first such appraisal. Three years later, when we published the State of State Standards 2000, 48 states had academic standards for English. And while it was understood that standards are just one leg in a reform tripod that also required assessments and accountability, every leg must be sturdy or the structure will topple.

In her 2000 review of state English standards, Sandra Stotsky found their most common failings in the teaching of beginning reading and the study of literature: less than half the states expected systematic phonics instruction, only 31 had decent literary standards, and just 21 specified the study of American or British literature. A third of the states had standards that were not even measurable, and half failed to reflect increasing levels of intellectual difficulty, thus providing scant guidance to curriculum developers, test-makers and teachers.

Standards-based reform has since received another major boost from NCLB. Prior to its enactment in 2002, Washington encouraged states to set standards. Now, as a condition of federal education assistance, they must set such standards in reading and math (and, soon, science) in grades 3-8; develop a testing system to track performance; and hold schools and school systems to account for progress toward universal proficiency as gauged by those standards.

Though tying federal dollars to school accountability has been controversial and, in some quarters, deplored and resisted, it was precisely the impetus that many states needed to improve their English standards. Looking across all the states in 2005, Stotsky finds substantial gains, especially in reading standards, which bear the heaviest weight under NCLB. The average state grade rose from 1.98 in 2000 to 2.41 in 2005. Most states have also heeded the emerging research consensus on early reading instruction and are incorporating the recommendations of Reading First into their standards, including systematic phonics instruction. Overall, they do a better job of addressing listening, reading, and writing skills and strategies than five years earlier.

That's the good news. Despite the gains, however, just 19 states earned "honors" grades on this year's evaluation of English standards, while eight received marks of D or F. Moreover, literature remains sorely neglected-even worse than before, particularly in high school. This is now the great weakness in state English standards, perhaps because NCLB focuses predominantly on grades 3-8. Uncorrected, it portends a generation of Americans who may know how to read but, by the end of high school, cannot be assumed to have read much that's worthwhile, let alone acquired a suitable grounding in the great works of our shared culture.

The Bush administration has made its top education priority the revitalization of American high-school education in general and its inclusion under an NCLB-style accountability regimen in particular. Half the states already have high-school exit exams with consequences for students. If the President has his way, Washington will be pushing every state to set and enforce rigorous academic standards at the high-school level.

Yet in just a handful of states are the high-school English standards ready to sustain that solemn burden. More than half do not even acknowledge American literature in their standards and only four-Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Massachusetts-provide sufficient specifics to frame a good high-school literature curriculum. Unless America is ready to settle for graduates who possess reading skills but have read little of significance, the success of the President's proposal is going to hinge on another bold transformation of state English standards in the years ahead.

This editorial is adapted from the "Foreword" to The State of State English Standards 2005.

"Math, English standards edge up," by George Archibald, Washington Times, January 5, 2005

"Indiana sets bar high for students," by Staci Hupp, Indianapolis Star, January 5, 2004

"Study flunks state's math, English criteria, Foundation describes standards as 'poorly written, pretentious,'" by Gregory Roberts, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 5, 2004

"State math standards ranked last nationally," by Treena Shapiro, Honolulu Advertiser, January 5, 2004

Why it seems like only yesterday. . . . Oops, sorry, this is not to be a sappy reminiscence by an aging fogey. (Well, aging, maybe.) But in greeting 2005, I want to explain some momentous changes these past four decades, for American education and for me.

Yes, two milestones were passed in 1965. Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ancestor of NCLB) - and I applied to the Harvard MAT program. A senior in college, I was swept up in volunteer social service programs of every sort, roused by the era's angry books about poverty and bad urban schools (Harrington's The Other America, Schrag's Village School Downtown, even Kozol's Death at an Early Age), stimulated by a guest lecture that Pat Moynihan gave in Ed Banfield's course on urban problems, and inspired by LBJ's insistence that the path out of poverty led through education and the suggestion that well-intended government programs such as Title I, Headstart, Upward Bound, Job Corps, Teacher Corps and Community Action were sure ways to place millions of needy families upon that path.

So to the distress of my parents I eschewed the family career - a fine Ohio law firm founded by my grandfather - and presented myself to Dean Ted Sizer and the other denizens of Appian Way as a candidate to become a bona fide educator.

I was, of course, a card-carrying, line-toeing, mid-'60s liberal. After all, I lived in Cambridge, Mass. We had scarcely dried our tears from Kennedy's assassination and the alternative to LBJ was Goldwater! Who could think that I and others like me, marching in synch with a beneficent federal government, would not clobber ignorance, end poverty, and turn America's inner cities into functioning, empowered, responsible communities?

Fast-forward forty years. The country changed. Education changed. The "problem definition" changed. The labels changed. And I changed.

What happened? I'll suggest ten partial explanations.

• Those ambitious programs turned out not to work very well and the problems they were combating proved tougher than we thought. The Head Start gains didn't last. Only a few Upward Bounders made it through college. Title I didn't cause schools to perform better. Some well-meaning policies even made things worse. (This was also true of a host of "social engineering" efforts. Remember compulsory busing?) More than a few other Johnson liberals were, in Irving Kristol's famous phrase, "mugged by reality" and began to second-guess their assumptions about the easy efficacy of public policy.
  
• Within education, the '60s "equality" goals were gradually displaced by a different but equally urgent problem: quality. We woke up one day to learn that SAT scores had plummeted. Employers grumped. International comparisons showed the U.S. in a bad way. The "Excellence Commission" warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity." (My earliest contribution to this awakening was a 1981 Life magazine article titled "A Call for Quality Education.")
  
• James Coleman's powerful insight gained traction, as more people recognized that the antidote to low achievement wasn't necessarily more spending - at least that there's no sure connection between what goes into a school as resources and what comes out as learning. (I first encountered this paradigm-shifting discovery as a grad student - by then in a doctoral program - when mentor Moynihan joined with Frederick Mosteller to conduct a celebrated Harvard "faculty seminar" devoted to a reanalysis of the Coleman data.)
  
• The better I got to know Washington, the more clearly I saw that Uncle Sam is a clumsy, imprecise fellow. At the Education Department, where I worked for several fascinating years in the mid-eighties, it proved hard enough to get checks delivered on time to the correct addresses. How could such an agency transform the practices of thousands of schools and millions of educators? Even the policies of fifty states?
  
• The state/local agencies that we trusted to do right by kids revealed themselves as part of the problem. School systems and state education departments were glad to take federal dollars but deeply averse to altering their own behaviors and routines, even when it became obvious that these fostered mediocrity, inequality, and inefficiency.
  
• The ever-balder self-absorption and power-greed of education's so-called stakeholders meant the producers were better served than the consumers. The teacher unions (whose role and clout ballooned during this period) were the worst offenders, but far from the only ones. "Education establishment" became a term of opprobrium, a source of trouble.
  
• The public school monopoly similarly revealed itself to be a wellspring of dysfunction. Its fierce opposition to initiatives like tuition tax credits (on which I worked alongside Senator Moynihan in the late 1970's) unmasked its determination to preserve control at all costs. Never mind that Catholic schools (the main focus of the Packwood-Moynihan bill) did a better job at a lower cost; never mind that many kids wanting to attend them could not afford to without financial help. Never mind that government routinely assisted students enrolled in Notre Dame and Fordham and St. Mary's. "Those kids belong to us" was the monopoly's message, "and so do all the education dollars."
  
• Even as Moynihan's ideas rubbed off on me, his party forsook me, moving leftward on myriad issues, foreign and domestic, and handcuffing itself to the unions. Meanwhile, the GOP shared my diagnosis of the problem and some of my ideas about solutions.
  
• The education profession forsook me, too, stubbornly pursuing ideas, strategies, and beliefs that simply didn't work. By 1981, Diane Ravitch and I founded the Educational Excellence Network. While many members were Democrats, all were discomfited by the regnant "progressivism" of the ed school thoughtworld (which I came to know up-close while on the Vanderbilt faculty).
  
• I got more experience with government and politics - and fell in with the likes of Lamar Alexander and Bill Bennett. This exposed me to the power of the bully pulpit to alter ideas and the value (and scarcity) of astute, idea-driven reformers in high places. It also buttressed my sense of the establishment's hostility to reform and the system's inertia. People started to call me a "conservative," but I saw myself (and still do) as a radical, seeking big changes on behalf of the poor and the powerless - and one day I realized that folks called "liberals" were more interested in maintaining the power structure and pleasing the stakeholders than in meeting the needs of children and boosting the performance of schools.

It's been quite a ride - and I see no signs that it's going to get smoother. So put on your seat belts. And Happy New Year.

It's a new year and new fights loom in state legislatures. In Utah, buoyed by a study suggesting that it might save $1.2 billion in K-12 costs by allowing students to enroll in private schools, proponents plan to push a tuition tax credit plan. But they've got the state's biggest newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, against them, as well as the teacher unions. A similar fight is brewing in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford wants a $3,000 tax credit passed this year. In Massachusetts, a state judge has allowed a case brought by three townships against the state Department of Education to continue to a hearing, and named a Marlborough charter school as a co-defendant. The case turns on whether the Advanced Math and Science Academy was improperly issued a charter (read more here). Bay State charter advocates fear that an adverse ruling could result in hostile new charter regulations. Meanwhile, Massachusetts charter schools and Governor Mitt Romney plan to reignite the debate on lifting that state's restrictive enrollment cap this year.

"Report fuels debate on school choices," by Ronnie Lynn, Salt Lake Tribune, December 23, 2004 (archived)

"Out-of-state donors big players in tuition credit debate," by Paul Rolly, Salt Lake Tribune, December 25, 2004

"School choice," by Claudia Smith Brinson, The State, January 3, 2005

"Case against charter school allowed to continue," by Kristen Bradley, MetroWest Daily News, January 4, 2005

College and university campuses across the country claim to be bastions of diversity, where students of every sort come together to learn, socialize and solve the great issues of the day. In truth, however, this diversity is rarely more than skin deep, emphasis on the "skin." Columnist John Leo argues that Newsweek's "'hottest' diversity campus" - Wesleyan - has virtually no intellectual diversity to speak of. Instead, Leo notes, "the students tend to have opinions from every corner of MoveOn.org" and "visiting speakers who challenge any aspect of the campus orthodoxy are as rare as woolly mammoths." Instead, the "diversity" that is celebrated on campus includes a left-liberal politically correct orthodoxy and is celebrated through the "naked dorm, the transgender dorm, the queer prom, the pornography-for-credit course, the obscene sidewalk chalking, the campus club named crudely for a woman's private part, or the appearance on campus of a traveling anti-Semitic road show, loosely described as a pro-Palestinian conference." And, of course, while all-female dorms are encouraged, the newest politically correct fight aims to force fraternities to accept women as members or "pay a stiff financial price." Leo notes that this crusade is particularly odd at Wesleyan since many of the frats there "are receptive to gays and set rooms aside for female residents." Leo's daughter, a liberal Democrat and 2004 graduate of the school, rightly questions what this narrow-mindedness is going to do to Democrats of her generation. In particular, she "wonders how [they] will be able to speak convincingly to the middle of the political spectrum when so many of them shun the complexity of arguments and simply spout the party line."

"Revealing Wesleyan," by John Leo, Townhall.com, January 3, 2005

Achieve, Inc.
2004

This short report from Achieve follows up on last year's American Diploma Project, which exposed shortcomings in high school graduation standards in relation to what's needed to succeed in college or the workplace. In diagnosing why this gap exists, Achieve now points (in part) to weak coursework expectations in most states. Though every student should receive four years each of grade-level English and math, few states meet either standard. (Notable exceptions include Arkansas, Indiana, and Texas.) Achieve also offers a variety of suggestions to states, including "model" curricula; better guidance on course content (as California has done via checklists of requirements for university admission); and incentives for students to take weightier course-loads. And in case anyone should doubt the value of a rigorous curriculum, it cites some interesting data: black students entering college with at least Algebra II under their belts increase their chances of completing college from 45 to 75 percent, and Latino students' odds rise from 61 to 79 percent. Achieve also notes that San Jose now requires all students to take the curriculum required to attend the U.C. system - and has seen its black students' test scores rise dramatically with no increase in dropout rates. True, states aren't the only actors - parents, for example, might also press their kids to take tougher courses - but if we expect all students to succeed in life then surely we must ensure that their school curricula reflect those expectations. You can read the report, including a mapping of each state's requirements, here.

Education Week
January 5, 2005

Education Week unveiled their 2005 edition of Quality Counts yesterday. Their annual state-by-state review of educational quality this year features "financing better schools," offering a tally of school spending hot topics like "equity and adequacy" in spending, allocation of funds per-pupil, achievement-based teacher pay incentives, and how states find the money to pay for their education costs (local taxes, lottery, etc.). Tucked neatly behind these pages, as always, are complete state-by-state report cards on more state education topics, including standards and accountability--coincidentally the very same day Fordham released its reviews of state math and English academic standards (see http://www.edexcellence.net/template/page.cfm?id=276). At first glance, it appears very simple to compare Ed Week's grades to our own, however the Ed Week study has some major differences. The standards (which were, in truth, graded by the AFT in a yet-to-be released report) only comprise a portion (40%) of the grade for each state and look more widely at four core subject areas (math, English, social studies/history, and science). Fordham grades are based entirely on the clarity, specificity, and content of the academic standards in math and English - the only two subjects currently influenced by NCLB - so please, compare with care. Stay tuned to this spot for more on the comparisons between Quality Counts and The State of State Standards: Math and English. To read the rest of Quality Counts, click here.

Public Agenda
November 16, 2004

This Public Agenda study, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, reports on children's "out-of-school time" activities and what the consumers of these activities (parents included) expect them to accomplish. Not surprisingly, many believe that quality organized activities - no matter if sports-, academic-, or hobby-centered - will help kids stay out of trouble. However, fewer than half of low-income parents report adequate access to high-quality options, vs. two-thirds of upper-income families. More surprising, poor families are also likelier to look for programs that focus on academics rather than sports or hobbies (45 percent vs. 35 percent upper-income). The study explores a wide range of topics from both parents' and kids' perspectives and, on top of income and race disparities in after-school programs, reveals a scary disconnect between what parents think their kids are doing in their free time and what the girls and boys are actually up to. To read on, click here.