The Education Gadfly Weekly

Jay P. Greene, Greg Forster, and Marcus A. Winters, Manhattan Institute
July 2003

Yet another attempt to answer the question: do charter schools raise student achievement? The issue is vexing, since most studies that compare charters to regular district schools don't take into account the kinds of students that charters tend to serve - low-income, minority, and other traditionally low-achieving populations. Now enter Manhattan Institute's Greene, Forster, and Winters with this study, which they say is the first useful comparison between charter schools and similar district schools. The authors strive to get beyond the skimpy school demographics available and to exclude "targeted" charter schools, i.e, those serving very specific populations (juvenile offenders, single mothers, extremely low-income students) on the legitimate grounds that these skew achievement data downward. The result is modest but significant: their sample of charter and "regular" schools in eleven states shows the former outperforming the latter by 3 percentage points (0.08 standard deviations) for students starting at the 50th percentile in math, and two percentage points (0.04 standard deviations) in reading. In some states (Texas and Florida, for example), the gains were even higher. This study is worth looking at, though it hasn't a hope of quelling the debate on whether charters raise student achievement more - or less - than "regular" public schools. Stuck with a paucity of hard data about such matters, the authors rely heavily on self-reporting by schools to determine which ones serve "targeted" populations, and they use "geography to control for demography" by comparing charters to the physically closest district school, a useful but hardly definitive way of pairing similar schools. Nobody has a flawless methodology here and nobody has straightforward data. Kudos to Jay Greene and associates for this valiant and generally enlightening effort. Take a look at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_01.htm.

Educational Testing Service
May 2003

Made all the more timely by recent Census news that Hispanics are the largest minority population in America, a new study from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) examines their less than equal representation in the fields of science and engineering. Although their share of postsecondary degrees is rising, ETS contends that "very large increases in the numbers of Hispanics earning degrees are required just to maintain the same proportions" considering the rapid growth of this minority group. In order to increase "Hispanic representation" in science and engineering, ETS argues that improvement is needed on four fronts: high school achievement, high school completion rates, college entry, and college completion. Note that this report focus only on science and engineering, barely acknowledging the importance of acquiring "a large cadre of well-educated workers in an array of fields that require quantitative and scientific knowledge." And without adequate projections of future employment rates in the scientific and engineering sectors, it's hard to get at fundamental factors influencing Hispanic (or anybody else's) representation in higher education and the workforce. To get the report, go to http://www.ets.org/research/pic/hispanic.pdf.

This is the second of the annual teacher quality reports that the Secretary of Education is required by No Child Left Behind to submit to Congress. Like last year's, the news in this report is mixed. Thirty-five states have linked their teacher certification requirements to student content standards; six are in the process of doing so. All but eight states now require statewide assessments of beginning teachers, while 32 require teaching candidates to pass a content test in at least one academic area. All well and good. Yet cut scores for many of these tests are abysmally low - in fact, every state save Virginia sets is passing bar lower than the national median score. And despite all this effort, barely half (54 percent) of the nation's secondary public school teachers count as "highly qualified." That number is even lower in the two key NCLB subjects, math (47 percent) and English (50 percent). In the end, while assessments and content standards are a step in the right direction, they still focus on what teachers know and not on what their pupils are learning. As the Paige report itself notes, "[H]ow would you know a highly qualified teacher if you saw one (other than looking at the achievement of his or her students)?" Indeed. Find this telling report at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/Title-II-Report.pdf.

National Center for Education Statistics
July 2003

Newly released by the Department of Education, this report compiles a wealth of data about how well our students performed on the NAEP writing assessment in 2002. This test was administered to 276,000 students in the fourth, eighth and twelfth grades, creating a representative sample from both public and private schools. The silver lining is that fourth and eighth graders made modest progress since 1998 (the last NAEP cycle in writing). But twelfth graders showed no significant change. More importantly, though, the report demonstrates once again how far we still have to go: in twelfth grade, just 24 percent of U.S. students write at a "proficient" level. Even more alarming are the figures for poor and minority students: only nine percent of black twelfth graders reached proficiency (a slight improvement over the 8 percent that did so in 1998). And the gaps between the best and worst performers, and between whites and blacks, have not improved. This report compares public and private schools and breaks down the data by state, grade, ethnicity, gender, parents' education, and sundry other factors. It also compares the 1998 and 2002 results whenever possible and includes sample questions and responses (the worst of which may make you wonder whether to laugh or cry). Several different versions of these results can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/writing/results2002/.

Krista Kafer
The Heritage Foundation
May 2003

This new publication by the Heritage Foundation provides a snapshot of school choice throughout America, covering everything from public school choice policies to charters and vouchers. It devotes several pages to each state, describing in detail both their choice programs and their educational performance. It also provides basic data on states' school systems, expenditures, and teachers, along with a listing of organizations active in each locale. The introduction serves as a useful primer on recent developments in school choice, and the book is a handy reference guide for anyone working in education. Heritage is also developing a website to accompany the book, so that readers can quickly get the most up-to-date information. Both the hardcopy publication and the on-line version are available at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/Schools/schoolchoice_2003.cfm.

As reported in Gadfly several weeks ago, Teach for America has feared for some time that it would be wounded by the drastic funding cuts for the national service program AmeriCorps. [See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=3#47.] This week, TFA's fears were realized, as the alternative teacher program was notified that 2,700 of its 3,300 corps members would not receive the $4,725 AmeriCorps education awards that TFA members have always earned - a shortfall of close to $13 million. TFA has mobilized its alumni to flood Capitol Hill with letters in anticipation of a House-Senate conference this week to negotiate a $100 million supplemental appropriation for AmeriCorps, which passed the Senate but was not included by the House. A coalition of AmeriCorps supporters from the business community is being led by Gap, Inc., chairman Don Fisher, a longtime Teach for America supporter.

"Teach for America shut out of the AmeriCorps national funding awards," Teach for America press release, July 15, 2003

"Executives urge Bush to save AmeriCorps," by Christopher Lee, Washington Post, June 29, 2003

By an overwhelming margin, the U.S. House of Representatives has raised the stakes on teacher preparation. The Ready to Teach Act, passed last week by a 404-17 vote, would make the passage rate of graduates of teacher training colleges a factor in awarding federal dollars to those institutions. More importantly, it would allow the achievement gains of a teacher's students to be one way of determining whether that teacher is "highly qualified." The bill would also encourage alternative certification, the easing of barriers to removing ineffective teachers, and merit pay systems based on student achievement gains. There's much to love about this bill, though Gadfly wishes it would go further and require teacher preparation programs to report on whether their graduates are increasing student achievement. After all, what's important is not whether teachers pass tests, but whether their pupils do. To sweeten the deal, a companion bill, the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act, more than triples the current education loan forgiveness for math, science, and special ed teachers in Title I schools, from $5,000 to $17,500. The National Education Association and the American Council on Education both say they're in favor - while calling for excision of the offending section on test passage, merit pay, etc. ACE president David Ward worried somewhat vaguely that the bill "will create a misleading perception of the quality of teacher education programs." (He might better worry that it will create an accurate perception of the quality of teacher education programs.) But the NEA flatly urged the House committee to "strike provisions & referring to merit pay, teacher advancement, and teacher removal; ... to address the incongruities associated with the current law's references to highly qualified teachers; and to reduce cumbersome reporting requirements" - essentially, to gut the bill of anything but federal handouts. Look for this issue to heat up in the Senate this fall.

"Teacher-college standards passed," by George Archibald, Washington Times, July 10, 2003

Letter from NEA government relations director Diane Shust to U.S. Congressmen, June 8, 2003

"Letter to the House Regarding the Ready to Teach Act and the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act," by David Ward, July 9, 2003

H.R. 2211, The Ready to Teach Act

H.R. 438, The Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act

In a decision the Las Vegas Review-Journal called "stunning," Nevada's highest court overturned a referendum twice passed by state voters that requires a supermajority of legislators to approve new tax increases. The basis: a desire to increase school funding. The case turned on whether the specifically enumerated supermajority requirement for tax increases trumps the general state constitutional requirement of a "fully funded" education system. By a 6-1 vote, the court said no, and essentially ordered the state to raise taxes-even higher than the record tax hike already approved this year - to increase school budgets. The court's decision went even further than the position advocated by the plaintiff, Governor Kenny Guin, and essentially adopted the amicus brief from the Nevada teachers union, which naturally proclaimed itself delighted with the outcome. Subsequently (this past Monday), a federal district judge called a halt to the legislature's proceedings to review the decision, leaving the whole question up in the air. We'll leave it to others to make their way through the constitutional maze. For our purposes, it's enough to note that "fully funded" is a pretty vague standard - and to remind readers that in education, money does not necessarily equal learning. Consider that Nevada's education spending rose 194 percent between 1983 and 1992, while enrollment increased only 40 percent. All the while, the state lags behind almost every other in NAEP results, high school dropout rates, and college matriculation.

"Constitutional ruling: court paves way for new taxes," by Sean Whaley and Ed Vogel, Las Vegas Review-Journal, July 11, 2003

"Republican appeal: judge blocks tax decision," by Sean Whaley and Ed Vogel, Las Vegas Review-Journal, July 15, 2003

"Nevada's judicial dice-throwers," Wall Street Journal editorial, July 15, 2003

Gadfly is generally unsympathetic to unexcused absences. But this time we'll make an exception. Last week, the House Government Reform committee passed a bill authorizing education vouchers in the nation's capital on a close-to-party-line vote of 22-21. Only the absence of opponent Representative Major Owens (D-N.Y.) saved the bill from being stalled in committee by a tie, which D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton called "bad luck" as she vowed to lead the charge against D.C. vouchers on the House floor. The committee bill would fund about 2,000 children to attend private schools on $7,500 vouchers; a similar Senate bill sponsored by Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) contains slightly less funding. [For previous coverage of the bill, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=4#34.] The bill's sponsor, Representative Tom Davis (R-Va.), said he hadn't decided yet whether to bring this measure to a separate vote in the fall or attach it to an appropriations bill. D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams deserves the thanks of parents and kids throughout D.C. for his courageous decision to buck his party and support the bill. By contrast, we give you another big city mayor, New York's Michael Bloomberg, who says he welcomes competition but can't support vouchers because they'd be "disruptive to the process." This week he told reporters, "We've got to focus on making what we've got work better."

"House panel approves plan for vouchers at District schools," by Sylvia Moreno, Washington Post, July 10, 2003

"Mayor spurns idea of school vouchers," by Kathleen Lucadamo, New York Sun (free registration required), July 15, 2003

"We expect," wrote Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, on behalf of a 5-4 Supreme Court majority okaying race-based affirmative action in the recent Michigan cases, "that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." [For Gadfly's coverage, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=4#35.] The "interest" to which she referred was, of course, the achievement of "diversity" in university enrollments.

There's been much discussion in education-land since the Court's ruling as to what must change, particularly within the K-12 system, in order for O'Connor's expectation to come true. That is, what must happen for affirmative action to wither away because so much education equalizing would have occurred that diversity can sustain itself without special preferences and double standards in college and grad-school admissions. It's a worthy goal, certainly, as well as the rationale for No Child Left Behind's focus on universal academic "proficiency." And it poses the greatest single challenge facing our education system and those who lead and work in it.

But is it realistic to think that affirmative action can ever fade away? Is it a temporary prop for those who need it, or a basic restructuring of societal assumptions that moves away from people denominated by their individual accomplishments and toward a land of group identity and privileges?

Two countries with long histories of group-denominated preferences offer strikingly different pictures of what the future might hold. India and Malaysia are both highly diverse nations, with many races, languages and religions - and tensions among them. Decades ago, each country began to reserve places in its universities (and government employment and other prized benefits) for groups deemed to be disadvantaged or in need of special help. In India's case, quotas for "untouchables" and indigenous tribes date back to 1950. Malaysia has been struggling at least since the early 1970s (when I first visited) to ensure that its Malay population gets as many of that society's advantages as the higher-achieving Chinese population. (The third big group in Malaysia is Indians, but there are also many indigenous tribal members, immigrants from Indonesia and the Philippines, etc.)

What's happening in those lands today, after decades of affirmative action?

In India, nearly universal "preferences" are fast arriving, a spoils system in which every single group and faction vies for its own guaranteed piece of the action. The Washington Post recently reported that the list of "backward" classes is growing to include even such improbable candidates as prosperous landowners and high-status Brahmins. (Roughly equivalent, in U.S. terms, to affirmative action for landlords and Episcopalians.) Nationwide, about half of India's population qualifies for affirmative-action quotas. In the once-princely state of Rajasthan, 78 percent are eligible. Says a leader of the quest to extend the quota system to upper-caste people, "Not a single politician dares to stop this thing. It's a big, big joke."

On the other hand, when revisiting Malaysia a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to read (in the Sarawak Sunday Tribune) that raced-based admission to higher education is on its way out. Meritocracy is in. The government has decided "to admit students into local universities on the basis of their public examination results and not race. With the enforcement of meritocracy, the public is led to think in good faith that the previous race-based quota system used for registering university students has now been discarded. It appears to be so...."

Is this happening because the race-based system was leading to balkanization and divisiveness in a country that yearns to foster unity? Or because affirmative action succeeded and the Malays are now doing as well as the Chinese? Or both? I do not know. But it's clear that Malaysia is finding that undoing a long-established preference system is touchy. It turned out, for example, that the latest medical school class at the University of Malaya contains just one Indian, a situation that was promptly denounced by Indian political leaders on grounds that it's not a "fair representation" of the country's demographics. This and "similar cases that have gone unreported" led the Sarawak columnist to wonder whether "the recently introduced system of meritocracy" ought not be rethought "given the complexity of our country's racial myriads [sic]."

He went on to note, in the spirit of Justice O'Connor, that if meritocracy is to determine university admissions, then the lower education system also needs an overhaul. Malaysia's primary and secondary schools are, in effect, segregated, with each of the "myriads" having its own separate institutions with distinctive curricula (and languages of instruction), uneven standards, and distinctive assessments. The columnist remarked that changes will be needed before such a balkanized primary-secondary system can feed into a single, meritocratic tertiary system.

The most striking thing about Malaysia today, aside from its evident prosperity, is its preoccupation with national unity and nervousness about inter-group tensions. Yes, every town sports a government-financed mosque and the country is generally perceived to be a Muslim nation. But it's also a real melting pot and lots of people - and especially its rather overbearing government - want its many subgroups to coexist equably. Is that why they're undoing race-based affirmative action?

Meanwhile, back in India, along with the continuing poverty of many millions, what is most apparent to the visitor and newspaper reader is that this once-secular democracy that strove to bridge its ethnic, religious, linguistic, and caste differences is now balkanizing before one's eyes. And the government is doing more than a little to foster that unhappy development. Thus we keep reading about Hindu-Muslim fights, the murder of Christian missionaries, and continuing caste conflicts. To what extent is affirmative action to blame? I can't be certain. But what must happen to a country where nearly everyone eventually qualifies for "preferences"? Doesn't one's group identity become the prized key to all valued services and benefits? Isn't one then bound to grow resentful of other groups? In time, aren't the essential building blocks of democracy itself - individual rights and equal opportunity - sure to be weakened?

Which direction is America headed?

This is the second of the annual teacher quality reports that the Secretary of Education is required by No Child Left Behind to submit to Congress. Like last year's, the news in this report is mixed. Thirty-five states have linked their teacher certification requirements to student content standards; six are in the process of doing so. All but eight states now require statewide assessments of beginning teachers, while 32 require teaching candidates to pass a content test in at least one academic area. All well and good. Yet cut scores for many of these tests are abysmally low - in fact, every state save Virginia sets is passing bar lower than the national median score. And despite all this effort, barely half (54 percent) of the nation's secondary public school teachers count as "highly qualified." That number is even lower in the two key NCLB subjects, math (47 percent) and English (50 percent). In the end, while assessments and content standards are a step in the right direction, they still focus on what teachers know and not on what their pupils are learning. As the Paige report itself notes, "[H]ow would you know a highly qualified teacher if you saw one (other than looking at the achievement of his or her students)?" Indeed. Find this telling report at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/Title-II-Report.pdf.

Educational Testing Service
May 2003

Made all the more timely by recent Census news that Hispanics are the largest minority population in America, a new study from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) examines their less than equal representation in the fields of science and engineering. Although their share of postsecondary degrees is rising, ETS contends that "very large increases in the numbers of Hispanics earning degrees are required just to maintain the same proportions" considering the rapid growth of this minority group. In order to increase "Hispanic representation" in science and engineering, ETS argues that improvement is needed on four fronts: high school achievement, high school completion rates, college entry, and college completion. Note that this report focus only on science and engineering, barely acknowledging the importance of acquiring "a large cadre of well-educated workers in an array of fields that require quantitative and scientific knowledge." And without adequate projections of future employment rates in the scientific and engineering sectors, it's hard to get at fundamental factors influencing Hispanic (or anybody else's) representation in higher education and the workforce. To get the report, go to http://www.ets.org/research/pic/hispanic.pdf.

Jay P. Greene, Greg Forster, and Marcus A. Winters, Manhattan Institute
July 2003

Yet another attempt to answer the question: do charter schools raise student achievement? The issue is vexing, since most studies that compare charters to regular district schools don't take into account the kinds of students that charters tend to serve - low-income, minority, and other traditionally low-achieving populations. Now enter Manhattan Institute's Greene, Forster, and Winters with this study, which they say is the first useful comparison between charter schools and similar district schools. The authors strive to get beyond the skimpy school demographics available and to exclude "targeted" charter schools, i.e, those serving very specific populations (juvenile offenders, single mothers, extremely low-income students) on the legitimate grounds that these skew achievement data downward. The result is modest but significant: their sample of charter and "regular" schools in eleven states shows the former outperforming the latter by 3 percentage points (0.08 standard deviations) for students starting at the 50th percentile in math, and two percentage points (0.04 standard deviations) in reading. In some states (Texas and Florida, for example), the gains were even higher. This study is worth looking at, though it hasn't a hope of quelling the debate on whether charters raise student achievement more - or less - than "regular" public schools. Stuck with a paucity of hard data about such matters, the authors rely heavily on self-reporting by schools to determine which ones serve "targeted" populations, and they use "geography to control for demography" by comparing charters to the physically closest district school, a useful but hardly definitive way of pairing similar schools. Nobody has a flawless methodology here and nobody has straightforward data. Kudos to Jay Greene and associates for this valiant and generally enlightening effort. Take a look at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_01.htm.

Krista Kafer
The Heritage Foundation
May 2003

This new publication by the Heritage Foundation provides a snapshot of school choice throughout America, covering everything from public school choice policies to charters and vouchers. It devotes several pages to each state, describing in detail both their choice programs and their educational performance. It also provides basic data on states' school systems, expenditures, and teachers, along with a listing of organizations active in each locale. The introduction serves as a useful primer on recent developments in school choice, and the book is a handy reference guide for anyone working in education. Heritage is also developing a website to accompany the book, so that readers can quickly get the most up-to-date information. Both the hardcopy publication and the on-line version are available at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/Schools/schoolchoice_2003.cfm.

National Center for Education Statistics
July 2003

Newly released by the Department of Education, this report compiles a wealth of data about how well our students performed on the NAEP writing assessment in 2002. This test was administered to 276,000 students in the fourth, eighth and twelfth grades, creating a representative sample from both public and private schools. The silver lining is that fourth and eighth graders made modest progress since 1998 (the last NAEP cycle in writing). But twelfth graders showed no significant change. More importantly, though, the report demonstrates once again how far we still have to go: in twelfth grade, just 24 percent of U.S. students write at a "proficient" level. Even more alarming are the figures for poor and minority students: only nine percent of black twelfth graders reached proficiency (a slight improvement over the 8 percent that did so in 1998). And the gaps between the best and worst performers, and between whites and blacks, have not improved. This report compares public and private schools and breaks down the data by state, grade, ethnicity, gender, parents' education, and sundry other factors. It also compares the 1998 and 2002 results whenever possible and includes sample questions and responses (the worst of which may make you wonder whether to laugh or cry). Several different versions of these results can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/writing/results2002/.