David Monk, John W. Sipple and Kieran Killeen, New York State Educational Finance Research ConsortiumSeptember 10, 2001
David Monk, John W. Sipple and Kieran Killeen, New York State Educational Finance Research Consortium
September 10, 2001
This 45-pager from the New York State Educational Finance Research Consortium was written by Penn State's David Monk and two colleagues. The basic questions it examines are how well school districts in the Empire State are complying with stiffer Regents requirements for high school graduation and what effects this is having. It includes both statistical analyses and interview data from five districts. Though fairly technical, it offers several interesting findings. First, as one might expect, the State Board of Regents' decision to require nearly all high-school students to take and pass more Regents exams before graduating has led more high-school students to take those exams, though there's much district-level variation in whether instructional and organizational changes are made to help them pass those exams. Second, as more students take these exams, the average score declines, with marked gaps between urban and non-urban districts. Third, more pressure from Regents exams does not seem to be producing more dropouts. Fourth, there's no clear correlation between district per-pupil spending levels and Regents exam participation rates. And fifth, there is a notable lack of consensus as to whether, in fact, "all children can learn" and whether the state should be requiring them to pass these exams in order to graduate. Teachers and community leaders are the most doubtful, superintendents and principals more apt at least to voice support for such policies. A dry but valuable study. You can obtain it at http://www.albany.edu/edfin/EFRC_pubspage.html.
Kariane Mari Welner, Teachers College, Columbia University
March 2002
This somewhat recherch?? paper by Kariane Mari Welner of the UCLA School of Education is another in the burgeoning series sponsored by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia. The author interviewed 26 home-schooling families to ascertain (among many things) how these parents conceive of democracy and whether there's a tension between their civic views and their decision to home-school their children. The conclusion: sometimes there is. The author sorts home-schoolers into the "civic minded" and the "autonomy minded" and examines various of their values and attitudes and how these intersect with different conceptions of democracy and philosophies of education. It may hold mild interest for political theorists and people trying to understand what makes home-schoolers tick (though it seems from this paper, as from most research on the subject, that they tick in many different ways that defy easy generalizations and categorizations-the more so when one's sample contains barely two dozen of them!). You can find it on the web at www.ncspe.org by clicking on "Occasional Papers."
Carol Ascher et al., Charter School Research Project, New York University
December 2001
New York University's Charter School Research Project, led by Carol Ascher, recently issued this 30-page report, covering the second year (2000-1) of a research project that's studying a sample of Big Apple charter schools (actually 8 of the 14 true charters then operating in the city plus two "alternative schools considering charter status"). The focus of this report is how the schools obtained support from other sources, including non-profit organizations, other charter schools, their sponsors and traditional public education providers. Since nearly all New York charter schools have such "partnerships," it's interesting to see how they make use of them. The answer is that they received a wide range of supports (money, experience, expertise, training, facilities, etc.) from their partner organizations, which in turn exerted considerable influence on them. This sometimes complicates school governance and leads a school's teachers and parents to feel marginalized. The authors offer a half dozen policy recommendations that would clarify these relationships, strengthen charter governance and boost the schools' funding from public sources, the inadequacy of which (even in high-spending New York) the authors deem "an obstacle" to those who might want to start charter schools in the Empire State. They're saying, in essence, that unless more ample provision is made for the start-up, capital and operating costs of charter schools in New York, there won't be a whole lot more of them and their private benefactors will exert undue influence over them. Especially considering the "establishmentarian" nature of the group doing this research (and their advisors, who include prominent charter critics), this is an unexpectedly perceptive and sympathetic report. If you'd like a copy, download a PDF at http://www.nyu.edu/iesp/publications/reports/GoingCharterPDFs.pdf.
Boston Municipal Research Bureau
March 2002
This short (8-page) and highly focused study by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau (in collaboration with the Massachusetts Advocacy Center) looks at how well the Boston Public School implemented some worthwhile reforms in the spring of 2001, reforms that the school system and its teachers' union had only agreed to in late 2000. The reason this is worth mentioning is that the reforms entailed giving school principals greater say over the selection of teachers for their schools than is common in big-city systems. The starting (and correct) premise is that staff selection is a key element of school success and that seniority rules shouldn't trump a school's ability to obtain the people it wants. Another change in Boston accelerated the annual teacher contracting cycle so that positions needing to be filled by going "outside the system" could be recruited for early enough to compete with suburban school systems. (Only in the context of an iron-grip teachers' contract would these even warrant attention. Many contractual impediments to staffing flexibility remain in Boston. Nothing, for example, was done about teacher tenure.) Considering the relatively short time the school system had to get ready for these changes in 2001, the authors of this report conclude, perhaps predictably, that they did pretty well but should do better next time. (Next time, incidentally, is right now.) If you'd like to read it, contact the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, Inc. at 617-227-1900. The report is free but you'll have to pay shipping.
Bill Hangley, Jr. and Wendy S. McClanahan, Public/Private Ventures
February 2002
President Bush deems faith-based organizations the backbone of society's "armies of compassion." But how good are those groups at collectively meeting specific needs of the poor and downtrodden? This 46-page report from Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) offers evidence that faith-based programs can indeed meet civic needs and meet them well, at least when carefully constructed and managed in partnership with secular organizations. The case in point is Youth Education for Tomorrow (YET), an innovative research-based literacy program developed by P/PV and run by a diverse group of faith-based organizations in Philadelphia. The organizations provided the space, volunteers, and children; P/PV offered them a clear model to follow, complete with funding, pedagogy, training and oversight. The more closely the sites followed P/PV's model, the better their results. Children who were up to three years below grade level achieved significant gains in reading ability after only a few months' participation in YET. But success-which was fairly consistent across sites despite variance in organizational capacity-didn't come easily. Anecdotes from interviews with site and P/PV staff highlight the challenges inherent in any funded partnership and underscore the need for a clear mission and impeccable planning and implementation. You'll find the report in both HTML and PDF versions at http://www.ppv.org.
Christopher W. Hammons, Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation
February 2002
Given the media hubbub surrounding the pending U.S. Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of school vouchers in Ohio, some may be surprised to learn that a kindred practice has been in place in rural Maine and Vermont since the late 19th century. In a Friedman Foundation report released in February, author Christopher Hammons explains those states' practice of "town tuitioning," which allows parents living in small districts that do not own and operate their own public schools to send their children to public or secular private schools in other districts, within or outside the state, using funds provided by the home district. Of nearly 500 towns in Maine, 55 "tuition out" all their students and another 93 tuition out all of their high school students. Of Vermont's 246 towns, 15 tuition out all students and 95 more do this with their high school students. Parental choice generally determines where these students attend school (64% of the time in Maine and 95% of the time in Vermont). Hammons argues that the advantages of town tuitioning are manifold: schools perform better in a competitive environment, the benefits of school choice are spread across racial and demographic divides, and the practice saves taxpayers millions. Possibly the most surprising aspect of town tuitioning is that these century-old programs have existed more or less under the radar of contemporary education debates, failing to draw the national attention that urban voucher programs have. You'll find this report at http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/grafx/finalmainetext.pdf. For more about this form of school choice in Maine and Vermont, see "Briefing Papers on Vouchers" at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=84#1280.
Opponents of high-stakes testing in Massachusetts are running out of time to convince a public that has largely accepted testing and academic standards, according to reporter Ed Hayward of the Boston Herald. A rally in Boston organized by a handful of students who spent their spring vacation lobbying for an end to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) graduation requirement drew only 40 people, mostly the students' parents and hard-core organizers of efforts to end the exam. While opponents of the MCAS remain in some of the state's most liberal locales, the high profile boycotts that took place in 2000 have declined drastically as scores have risen, Hayward writes. The percentage of students who passed the English section of the test jumped from 66 percent to 82 percent between 2000 and 2001, and the percentage who passed the math section rose from 55 percent to 75 percent. For more see "MCAS protests waning as exam gains acceptance," by Ed Hayward, Boston Herald, April 21, 2002.
President Bush introduced the 2002 teacher of the year-a retired Army colonel from southern California-at a Rose Garden ceremony yesterday. Chancey Veatch, a social studies teacher at Coachella Valley High School in Thermal, California, said he believes that struggling teachers can improve by looking to colleagues for help; "I'm a really strong advocate that you don't have to wait until somebody trains you." After retiring from the Army in 1995, Veatch, who had no teaching experience, called up the local school district a few days before the beginning of the school year, looking for a substitute teaching job. He was offered his own classroom, teaching eighth-grade science and math. Veatch said he looked to his brother and sister, both teachers, for guidance. He spent the next three years taking classes at night, on weekends, and in the summer to receive certification. President Bush has championed the Troops to Teachers program, which matches retired military personnel with public schools. For more see "The new teacher of the year, a retired Army colonel from southern California..." by Greg Toppo, AP Wire, April 23, 2002. More information is available at http://www.ccsso.org/ntoy/2002/ntoy02.html.
Both standards-based and market-style reforms come from outside the system but they follow different theories and many people believe they are incompatible. After all, standards-based reform-typified by statewide academic standards, tests and rewards/sanctions a la President Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation-is top-down, driven by elites that tell schools what results to achieve and reward and punish them. Market-style reform-vouchers, charters, privately operated public schools, home-schooling, "virtual" schooling, etc.-is populist and bottom-up, relying on the preferences of clients to signal to schools what must be done and on the individual actions of schools and educators to satisfy those clients.
In today's education policy tussles, each has many fans and partisans, but their advocates tend to be leery of one another. Advocates of the marketplace don't think a dirigiste, state-run accountability system can ever work well, while cheerleaders for "systemic" reform doubt that markets will be good for schools, children, or the common weal.
Can they work together? Can a hybrid system succeed? We have promising evidence from charter schools, which must contend with both forms of accountability at the same time and which generally find it possible to balance them. We also find an interesting example in Florida, which has devised a standards-based accountability system that uses exposure to the marketplace as the ultimate "consequence" that can befall a failing school. Enacted in 1999, Florida's "A+" plan assigns a letter grade to every public school based primarily on its school's performance on statewide tests. If a school gets an "F" for two years, its students become eligible for vouchers, i.e. can take their state dollars to the schools of their choice, including private and parochial schools. (George W. Bush proposed something similar for failing Title I schools but Congress demurred.)
At least one analyst who has examined the Florida program judges that it was precisely the threat of vouchers that has caused the state's failing public schools to tug hard on their own bootstraps. In other words, exposure to the marketplace-even a whiff of the marketplace-is an action-forcing consequence that can play a constructive role within a regimen of standards-based reform.
To my eye, though, the greatest source of interdependence between standards-based and market-style accountability is that each offers a promising solution to a big problem besetting the other.
We have ample evidence that standards-based systems are better at identifying failing schools than at fixing them. In most jurisdictions, the list of failing schools doesn't change much from one year to the next, despite many efforts to improve them. Unfortunately, bad schools are extremely hard to transform into good ones, particularly when the main agents of their transformation are lumbering government bureaucracies working within a political environment where myriad interest groups have great power to block changes that they dislike.
The upshot is that children enrolled in failing schools are apt to linger for years in classrooms where they learn very little. What's happened is that a pure standards-based accountability system has succeeded in revealing shortcomings that it is incapable of fixing.
What to do? Bring market forces to bear. Move the children to more effective schools, or turn them loose to move themselves. This is all but certain to benefit the youngsters who do move. And, as we have seen in Florida, Albany, Milwaukee, and elsewhere, it may also trigger needed changes in the schools they are leaving, which betters the lot of those youngsters who don't exit. No, we don't have solid, large-scale data. But we have suggestive research by Caroline Hoxby, indicating that school systems produce stronger results when they face competition and we have lots of case studies and small-scale research on charter schools that generally point in the same direction.
The converse is also true. Market-style reform benefits from standards and tests. That's because the education market, in and of itself, is often flawed. Private schools, for example, are often coy about their actual academic results because they prefer to rely on their reputations to market themselves to customers. Those reputations may be justified-or they may not. Without a transparent marketplace based on uniform standards and replete with comparable and readily accessible achievement data, one must trust every school to tell the truth. Thus we could have a situation where schools are formally answerable to the marketplace yet their consumers are unable to make informed choices among them. That leads in time to market failure. How can people know what school to choose-and resist false claims and unwarranted reputations-if they don't have the kinds of comparative performance data that are most apt to emerge from a system of uniform standards and tests? How will educators know which schools are most worth teaching in? How will prospective school founders know which education niches cry out to be filled with high-quality alternatives?
The solution seems obvious: create a regimen of uniform academic standards for core subjects, uniform (or comparable) assessments, and a transparent, publicly accessible, reporting system, whereby every school and other provider of instruction can be carefully scrutinized by quality-minded shoppers in the education marketplace.
The marketplace will work better if standards, tests and reporting systems are in place. And systemic reform will work better if there are bona fide alternatives for kids otherwise stuck in schools that have been revealed to be failing. So let's do both. If we're serious about school improvement and accountability, let's go for the combination of standards-based reform and market-style reform. Not only can they coexist. They need each other.
What effect do charter schools have on school districts as a whole? Do they inspire improvements in regular district schools or merely drain money from the district's budget? A cover story in this week's Education Week by Catherine Gewertz takes a close look at how the charter school drama is playing out in Dayton, Ohio, an economically embattled Rust Belt city where 15 percent of the district's school-age children now attend a dozen charter schools. Besides the students lost to charter schools, the district has also watched them depart via privately-financed school vouchers, declining birthrates, and middle class flight, and this downward enrollment trend has led to cutbacks in the district's administrative, custodial, and support staff. But instead of viewing charter schools as threats or denying that they'd ever amount to much, school district leaders in Dayton acknowledge that the out-migration by students reflects some of the failings of the district's schools and compels them to improve. A newly unified district administration and reform-minded school board are now embarking on a series of initiatives to raise student achievement in Dayton, Gewertz writes. "People are coming together more now and focusing on how to create a viable education system that includes all these various options," says Tom Lasley, the dean of the ed school at the University of Dayton. For more see "Dayton Feels the Heat from Charter Schools," by Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, April 24, 2002.
Bill Hangley, Jr. and Wendy S. McClanahan, Public/Private Ventures
February 2002
President Bush deems faith-based organizations the backbone of society's "armies of compassion." But how good are those groups at collectively meeting specific needs of the poor and downtrodden? This 46-page report from Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures (P/PV) offers evidence that faith-based programs can indeed meet civic needs and meet them well, at least when carefully constructed and managed in partnership with secular organizations. The case in point is Youth Education for Tomorrow (YET), an innovative research-based literacy program developed by P/PV and run by a diverse group of faith-based organizations in Philadelphia. The organizations provided the space, volunteers, and children; P/PV offered them a clear model to follow, complete with funding, pedagogy, training and oversight. The more closely the sites followed P/PV's model, the better their results. Children who were up to three years below grade level achieved significant gains in reading ability after only a few months' participation in YET. But success-which was fairly consistent across sites despite variance in organizational capacity-didn't come easily. Anecdotes from interviews with site and P/PV staff highlight the challenges inherent in any funded partnership and underscore the need for a clear mission and impeccable planning and implementation. You'll find the report in both HTML and PDF versions at http://www.ppv.org.
Boston Municipal Research Bureau
March 2002
This short (8-page) and highly focused study by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau (in collaboration with the Massachusetts Advocacy Center) looks at how well the Boston Public School implemented some worthwhile reforms in the spring of 2001, reforms that the school system and its teachers' union had only agreed to in late 2000. The reason this is worth mentioning is that the reforms entailed giving school principals greater say over the selection of teachers for their schools than is common in big-city systems. The starting (and correct) premise is that staff selection is a key element of school success and that seniority rules shouldn't trump a school's ability to obtain the people it wants. Another change in Boston accelerated the annual teacher contracting cycle so that positions needing to be filled by going "outside the system" could be recruited for early enough to compete with suburban school systems. (Only in the context of an iron-grip teachers' contract would these even warrant attention. Many contractual impediments to staffing flexibility remain in Boston. Nothing, for example, was done about teacher tenure.) Considering the relatively short time the school system had to get ready for these changes in 2001, the authors of this report conclude, perhaps predictably, that they did pretty well but should do better next time. (Next time, incidentally, is right now.) If you'd like to read it, contact the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, Inc. at 617-227-1900. The report is free but you'll have to pay shipping.
Carol Ascher et al., Charter School Research Project, New York University
December 2001
New York University's Charter School Research Project, led by Carol Ascher, recently issued this 30-page report, covering the second year (2000-1) of a research project that's studying a sample of Big Apple charter schools (actually 8 of the 14 true charters then operating in the city plus two "alternative schools considering charter status"). The focus of this report is how the schools obtained support from other sources, including non-profit organizations, other charter schools, their sponsors and traditional public education providers. Since nearly all New York charter schools have such "partnerships," it's interesting to see how they make use of them. The answer is that they received a wide range of supports (money, experience, expertise, training, facilities, etc.) from their partner organizations, which in turn exerted considerable influence on them. This sometimes complicates school governance and leads a school's teachers and parents to feel marginalized. The authors offer a half dozen policy recommendations that would clarify these relationships, strengthen charter governance and boost the schools' funding from public sources, the inadequacy of which (even in high-spending New York) the authors deem "an obstacle" to those who might want to start charter schools in the Empire State. They're saying, in essence, that unless more ample provision is made for the start-up, capital and operating costs of charter schools in New York, there won't be a whole lot more of them and their private benefactors will exert undue influence over them. Especially considering the "establishmentarian" nature of the group doing this research (and their advisors, who include prominent charter critics), this is an unexpectedly perceptive and sympathetic report. If you'd like a copy, download a PDF at http://www.nyu.edu/iesp/publications/reports/GoingCharterPDFs.pdf.
Christopher W. Hammons, Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation
February 2002
Given the media hubbub surrounding the pending U.S. Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of school vouchers in Ohio, some may be surprised to learn that a kindred practice has been in place in rural Maine and Vermont since the late 19th century. In a Friedman Foundation report released in February, author Christopher Hammons explains those states' practice of "town tuitioning," which allows parents living in small districts that do not own and operate their own public schools to send their children to public or secular private schools in other districts, within or outside the state, using funds provided by the home district. Of nearly 500 towns in Maine, 55 "tuition out" all their students and another 93 tuition out all of their high school students. Of Vermont's 246 towns, 15 tuition out all students and 95 more do this with their high school students. Parental choice generally determines where these students attend school (64% of the time in Maine and 95% of the time in Vermont). Hammons argues that the advantages of town tuitioning are manifold: schools perform better in a competitive environment, the benefits of school choice are spread across racial and demographic divides, and the practice saves taxpayers millions. Possibly the most surprising aspect of town tuitioning is that these century-old programs have existed more or less under the radar of contemporary education debates, failing to draw the national attention that urban voucher programs have. You'll find this report at http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/grafx/finalmainetext.pdf. For more about this form of school choice in Maine and Vermont, see "Briefing Papers on Vouchers" at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=84#1280.
David Monk, John W. Sipple and Kieran Killeen, New York State Educational Finance Research Consortium
September 10, 2001
This 45-pager from the New York State Educational Finance Research Consortium was written by Penn State's David Monk and two colleagues. The basic questions it examines are how well school districts in the Empire State are complying with stiffer Regents requirements for high school graduation and what effects this is having. It includes both statistical analyses and interview data from five districts. Though fairly technical, it offers several interesting findings. First, as one might expect, the State Board of Regents' decision to require nearly all high-school students to take and pass more Regents exams before graduating has led more high-school students to take those exams, though there's much district-level variation in whether instructional and organizational changes are made to help them pass those exams. Second, as more students take these exams, the average score declines, with marked gaps between urban and non-urban districts. Third, more pressure from Regents exams does not seem to be producing more dropouts. Fourth, there's no clear correlation between district per-pupil spending levels and Regents exam participation rates. And fifth, there is a notable lack of consensus as to whether, in fact, "all children can learn" and whether the state should be requiring them to pass these exams in order to graduate. Teachers and community leaders are the most doubtful, superintendents and principals more apt at least to voice support for such policies. A dry but valuable study. You can obtain it at http://www.albany.edu/edfin/EFRC_pubspage.html.
Kariane Mari Welner, Teachers College, Columbia University
March 2002
This somewhat recherch?? paper by Kariane Mari Welner of the UCLA School of Education is another in the burgeoning series sponsored by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia. The author interviewed 26 home-schooling families to ascertain (among many things) how these parents conceive of democracy and whether there's a tension between their civic views and their decision to home-school their children. The conclusion: sometimes there is. The author sorts home-schoolers into the "civic minded" and the "autonomy minded" and examines various of their values and attitudes and how these intersect with different conceptions of democracy and philosophies of education. It may hold mild interest for political theorists and people trying to understand what makes home-schoolers tick (though it seems from this paper, as from most research on the subject, that they tick in many different ways that defy easy generalizations and categorizations-the more so when one's sample contains barely two dozen of them!). You can find it on the web at www.ncspe.org by clicking on "Occasional Papers."
