The Education Gadfly Weekly

Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
April 2002

This useful ten-page review of charter-school research literature was published by the University of Pennsylvania-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and written by Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler of Rutgers University. It's straightforward and fair-minded, useful to anyone seeking a fast overview of what's been learned to date by umpteen studies of charter schools. Be warned, though, that, on just about all the important issues, the evidence they've gathered is ambiguous, inconclusive or simply mixed. You can find it on the web at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rb35.pdf. A longer version (which I've not had the opportunity to review) will be available next week at http://www.cpre.org.

Abell Foundation
March 2002

The ever-useful Abell Foundation has just issued this blunt, alarming report on the education disaster at the intersection of Baltimore's moribund school system and the troubled community college that receives a large fraction of that system's graduates. Anybody concerned about the reform of urban education at either the K-12 level or the postsecondary level and, especially, at the difficulties where they're supposed to mesh, will do well to read this bleak, hard-hitting account. You can find both a short version and a long version on the Foundation's website at www.abell.org. (Both are in PDF format.)

Noelle C. Griffin and Priscilla Wohlstetter, Teachers College Record
April 2001

Through a series of focus groups-including charter school founders/directors, administrators and teachers-the authors investigated 17 charter schools and the key instructional and organizational practices that they established in their start-up phase. Specifically, the authors looked at the experiences of these schools-six schools each in Boston and Los Angeles; and five schools in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area-in developing an instructional/curricular program, an accountability system, and school management/leadership processes. According to the authors (scholars at the University of Southern California), the charter school personnel interviewed found it difficult to develop coherent instructional programs. Many struggled with the "make versus buy" dilemma-should the school create its own instructional program from scratch or buy a pre-existing package that could be implemented quickly? The schools in the study tended to have a "pioneer" ethos that led them to create their own. This was time-consuming of course, and often collided with the realities of running a charter school: budget issues, relevant district, state, and federal policies, insurance, meals, security, custodians, substitutes, special education issues, and bus companies. As one school administrator lamented, "The logistics can kill you. The smallest part of my time goes to teaching and learning issues." As a result, many of these schools lacked a well-developed structure. "We limped through the first year in our approach to math-we had no textbook, no formal curriculum, and no one in charge of making those decisions," observed one school administrator. As for developing an accountability system, the authors discovered that there were strong feelings of informal accountability to the local school community, especially parents and to students. Yet teachers in many of the schools felt outright hostility and derision towards external accountability. One school leader stated bluntly, "We buck the accountability plan. I simply say I don't know state regulations." When it came to developing school management/leadership processes, many of the school leaders exhibited an "outlaw mentality." They saw themselves as fighting what they perceived as the ills of American public education, and this attitude appeared to generate and sustain commitment to the charter school. An elementary school administrator summed it up this way: "We're all here for a purpose...we're all here together because we chose to be." Although this article is more than a year old, it is worth reading if you want to appreciate the challenges facing those entrepreneurs struggling to make charter schools work. To see the report for yourself, go to www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentID=10722.

Timothy A. Hacsi
March 2002

This new book by Harvard ed school researcher Timothy A. Hacsi tours the reader through five contentious education policy questions (does Headstart work, does bilingual education work, does class size matter, is social promotion a good or bad thing, will spending more on schools make them better) and comes to the earth-shattering conclusion that politicians wrestling with these matters have not always based their decisions on what Hacsi would judge to be the best social science evidence. In fairness, he acknowledges that much of that evidence isn't really very good, that many education program evaluations are flawed, and that in many cases the best available answer isn't yes or no but, rather, "depends on how it's done." For the most part, however, he places greater faith in experts than in public opinion or the priority judgments of elected officials, and on several of these contentious issues he comes down firmly on the higher-spending side of the debate. While he doesn't quite finger a "great right wing conspiracy" for manipulating the other side, he comes close. I doubt that this book will put an end to any of these arguments, but by reading it you can at least get a sense of what's being argued about. Published by the Harvard University Press, the ISBN is 0674007441, it's 260 pages long, and you can get it through a bookseller or obtain additional information from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HACCHI.html.

Council of Chief State School Officers
April 2002 (draft)

The Council of Chief State School Officers recently produced this 45-page draft paper on states' responsibilities under the new NCLB legislation. Addressing Titles I, II and III of the Act, it sets forth in a clear, factual and detailed way what states must do by when to comply with these multitudinous and complex requirements. You'll find a PDF version at http://www.ccsso.org/pdfs/NCLB2002.pdf.

In the belief that public understanding of the Middle East will strengthen American security, the government subsidizes the work of Middle Eastern studies programs at universities around the country. But while trying to encourage the study of foreign languages and areas of the world that pose a challenge to U.S. interests, Congress is inadvertently pouring millions of dollars into the hands of some of the most anti-American scholars in the academy, explains Stanley Kurtz in an article from National Review Online. And since some of these federal funds must go toward outreach programs that educate elementary and high-school students, the result is taxpayer-subsidized courses to train teachers about the Middle East prepared by authors who have made outrageously anti-American statements since September 11th. This list includes such figures as Tariq Ali (who says that George Bush and Osama bin Laden are two peas in a pod, violent fundamentalists each, and calls for an end to the U.S. presence in the Middle East), Arundhati Roy (who has called bin Laden Bush's twin and said that the Taliban's sins can't begin to compare to the genocidal actions of the coalition against terror), and Robert Fisk (who has denied that the war has anything to do with the struggle of democracy against terror), all included in a set of teacher-training resources assembled by the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Because Middle Eastern studies programs at most American universities are dominated by an ideology known as "post-colonialism," Kurtz explains, they do little to enhance America's security. A set of ideological blinders has prevented them from taking the threat of terrorism seriously, he writes, so instead of alerting the country to the problem, scholars have instead criticized as racists or bigots those few policymakers who have warned of the coming terror. But rather than ending the flow of federal funds to these centers, Congress is about to massively increase their funding. For details see "Anti-Americanism in the Classroom," by Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, May 16, 2002.

In recent months, policymakers and policy wonks alike have been singing the praises of value-added analysis, which focuses on the achievement gains that a school or teacher elicits rather than just looking at how high the students score, since high or low scores of students in a school may reflect the socioeconomic makeup of the student body (and other "input" variables) rather than the quality or effectiveness of the teaching staff. But those who look to value-added assessment as the solution to the problem of educational accountability are likely to be disappointed, as there are too many uncertainties and inequities, argues University of Massachusetts economist Dale Ballou in an article appearing in the Summer 2002 issue of Education Next. Ballou outlines three problems with today's value-added assessment techniques: current methods of testing don't measure gains very accurately; some of the gains may be attributable to factors other than the quality of a given school or teacher; and we lack a firm basis for comparing gains of students of different levels of ability.

In response to Ballou's article, Anita Summers (professor emeritus at Wharton (and mother of Harvard President Lawrence Summers)) writes that the findings of value-added analysis are robust in practice and can be used in many ways that respect the margin of error of the statistical techniques. In another response, the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene argues that any flaws in the technique do not automatically lead to the conclusion that value-added analysis shouldn't be used to hold educators accountable since the alternative-failing to reward productivity at all-is so much worse. In yet another article, Don McAdams, a 12-year veteran of the school board in Houston, describes how important test data-imperfect as it is-has been to that district's improvement efforts.

The summer issue of Education Next magazine also includes articles on what the Supreme Court's decision in Zelman will mean for the voucher debate, on how the media has falsely given the impression that school violence is on the rise, on how peers influence student achievement, and other topics. All articles are available online at http://www.educationnext.org/20022/.

"Sizing Up Test Scores," by Dale Ballou, Education Next, Summer 2002
"Expert Measures," by Anita Summers, Education Next, Summer 2002
"The Business Model," by Jay Greene, Education Next, Summer 2002
"Enemy of the Good," by Don McAdams, Education Next, Summer 2002

Secretary of Education Rod Paige is asking teachers to help reclaim Memorial Day for its intended purpose of honoring those who have died in service to our country. He's asked educators to let students know about a National Moment of Remembrance to be observed on Memorial Day, May 27, at 3:00 pm, when Americans everywhere will pause to reflect on our fallen heroes and the freedoms guaranteed by the sacrifices of men and women who gave their lives. The idea of the National Moment of Remembrance was born in 1996, when children touring Washington were asked what Memorial Day means to them and responded, "That's the day the pools open." For more information, visit the official website at www.remember.gov.

Considerable attention has recently focused on a bill (AB 2160) working its way through the California legislature that would expand the scope of collective bargaining beyond wages and working conditions to include matters of education policy such as curriculum and textbooks. The bill has the strong support of the California Teachers Association, the state's largest teacher union. The bill's sponsor, LA Democratic Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, argues that teachers have inadequate input on matters of education policy and sees the bill as a remedy. Similar, although less sweeping, legislation is being considered in Tennessee and Maryland.

While few would quarrel with the notion that teachers should be involved in decisions about curriculum and textbooks, the relevant public policy question is whether the collective bargaining process is the right venue for such involvement. I don't believe that teachers will gain the input they want from this bill. And not only is there no evidence that expanding the domain of collective bargaining in this way would improve the performance of public schools, it is likely to raise costs and slow the process of school reform.

If education policy is placed in the domain of collective bargaining, teacher unions would have rights that no other education stakeholders currently enjoy. If a group of parents or members of the local business community approach the local school district with concerns about curriculum, textbooks, or education policy, school administrators are under no obligation to reach a legally binding, contractual settlement with these groups.

In states such as California with collective bargaining laws, the local teacher union is the exclusive bargaining agent for all teachers in the district. The school district is required by law to "bargain in good faith" with the union over issues that are in the scope of bargaining. A district that fails to do so can find itself fined or otherwise sanctioned by the state employment relations commission. Moreover, on topics covered by the scope of bargaining, the school district must negotiate only with the teacher union. It cannot meet with an alternative teacher organization or groups of teachers. To do so would violate state labor law.

If this bill becomes law, would a school's union representative then need to be present if a principal wants to eat lunch with that school's science teachers to discuss textbooks, lab procedures and curriculum? Would a teacher who favors phonics over whole language methods be obliged to communicate this judgment to her principal only though the union representative? Skeptics may dismiss such scenarios as far-fetched. However, anyone familiar with collective bargaining knows that the process commonly results in a rigid, highly structured, and cumbersome method of dialogue and decision-making.

Bargaining in good faith means that there is give and take in negotiations. Suppose a school district wants to require teachers to stay after school for an additional 20 minutes. It cannot implement the change without first negotiating an agreement with the union. This has two important consequences. The first is delay. Bargaining over a change may take weeks, months, even years. In addition, the district must be willing to give something in return (typically more pay) in order to get the union to agree to the change.

Placing education policy within the scope of bargaining means that school districts will need to negotiate all curricular and instructional changes with the union, and the union will be able to extract benefits for its members whenever a district desires a change in the curriculum. If the district sought to change from one math textbook to another, the union could, if it chose, extract some type of compensation from the district for the change. In effect, the union would be given the ability to levy a tax on any change in education policy. This union-imposed tax would raise the cost of school reform and thus slow its implementation.

Unions might exact greater compensation for policies that cut into their membership. Suppose, for example, that the district found that direct instruction methods for teaching a particular subject were superior to small group methods. Further suppose that the use of direct instruction permitted the district to raise class size from, say, 23 to 26 students and still yield gains in student performance. The union will not be neutral on this matter since its dues income is tied to the number of teachers employed, not to student achievement gains. Thus, the union is likely to favor small classes and individualized or small group instruction regardless of the educational or fiscal merits of alternatives.

It should also be noted that the phrase "teacher union" is somewhat misleading. In many states, affiliates of the NEA and AFT also represent non-professional employees of school districts such as teacher aides, janitors, secretaries, bus drivers, etc. If it were found that replacing teacher aides with computers would raise student achievement and lower costs, local affiliates of the NEA and AFT would have a duty to represent the workers whose jobs are at stake, not to lower costs or boost student achievement.

This demarcation between union and management interests is clearly understood in private sector collective bargaining. No one expects the United Auto Workers to represent the interests of auto consumers or auto company shareholders in negotiations. Questions of product mix, design, marketing, and development are strictly areas of management prerogative in private sector labor relations. This is not to say that auto company managers don't maintain a dialogue with employees about these matters, but the collective bargaining process is not the right venue for such discussions.

Even if teacher unions were to adopt an altruistic position and not use their new power under AB 2160 to extract pecuniary gains, the mere fact that education policy is now subject to collective bargaining would still raise costs for schools, since more time would be taken by the collective bargaining process itself, which would mean more paid release time for teacher union representatives, more management time consumed in bargaining, more grievances, more fact-finding, more legal fees, etc. Along with these direct resource costs would come the opportunity costs of school reforms not implemented. As one California school administrator put it, "The broader the scope of collective bargaining, the greater the opportunity for deadlock and delay."

And once they reach an agreement on a curricular matter, the parties are then locked into a contract for several years. What if, during the term of a contract, evidence emerges that better textbooks or a different curriculum is available? Must school administrators wait until the next contract is ready to be negotiated to begin discussing a change? Imagine if doctors were bound by a collective bargaining agreement to continue with an inferior drug or procedure? Surely that would be grounds for a malpractice suit.

For all its costs, proponents might still argue that this bill is necessary in order to provide teachers with more input into the education process. Yet the experience of private school teachers shows that it is possible for teachers to have considerable professional input into education policy decisions without collective bargaining. Dale Ballou and I analyzed public and private school teacher survey responses from the 1987-88 and 1990-91 federal Schools and Staffing Surveys (http://www.missouri.edu/~econ4mp/mp2.pdf). On every dimension of data collected in these surveys-curriculum, student assignments and discipline, cooperative relations with colleagues, treatment like a professional-private school teachers reported significantly more favorable conditions than public school teachers. Yet collective bargaining is virtually nonexistent in private schools. Moreover, preliminary data from teachers in charter schools (which are primarily non-union) suggests a similar collaborative pattern.

A more promising way to enhance teacher professionalism is to break up these large bureaucracies and create a more competitive market for K-12 education services. In this way, teaching would become more like every other profession. What other profession deploys its members in "bargaining units" with thousands of members and attempts to regulate professional communication through collective bargaining? In private schools and more entrepreneurial parts of public education (like charter and magnet schools), education services are often delivered by teams of teachers with principals or head teachers serving as team leaders. This team production model is common in nearly every other professional workplace as well. Relations among members of these teams are cooperative and based on professional norms and expertise, not the adversarial and litigious collective bargaining model.

Assemblywoman Goldberg is no doubt correct in her assessment that many Los Angeles teachers are not treated like professionals. That problem deserves solving. But not by placing education policy into the collective bargaining arena.

Michael Podgursky is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri and co-author of the recent Fordham report, "Personnel Policy in Charter Schools."

After California Governor Gray Davis threatened to veto AB 2160 (discussed in the accompanying editorial by Michael Podgursky) if it included a provision expanding collective bargaining to cover curriculum and textbook decisions, the bill was amended by a legislative committee yesterday to prohibit any expansion of collective bargaining, but substituting a new process by which teachers and district representatives could negotiate academic matters. While Podgursky nicely lays out the reasons that expanding collective bargaining would be bad public policy, the Governor's veto threat seemed to be as much about politics as policy-the latest episode in the ongoing soap opera of a relationship between Davis and the 330,000 member California Teachers Association. Frustrated by Davis's education policy, the union has pushed its own ambitious policy agenda this year-including a bill to revamp the state's testing and school accountability programs-that has been backed by a $3 million ad campaign. The CTA gave $1.3 million to Davis' last campaign, but so far has only given $60,000 for his re-election bid, according to reporter John Simerman. In recent weeks, CTA President Wayne Johnson has bashed the governor for soliciting a $1 million donation from the union. "We're upset with people who come to us and say 'We want your support and we support union issues,' and then, when they don't support us, we're supposed to be ok with that?" Johnson said to a reporter. "We're not." Tim Hodson, the executive director of the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State University, commented, "When the histories are written for this, it will be a wonderful example of an organization becoming so infatuated with its own clout that it thought it could do anything at any cost." For more see "Governor's threat scuttles teacher textbook bargaining," by John Simerman, Contra Costa Times, May 22, 2002 and "Teachers' proposal amended," by Jim Sanders, Sacramento Bee, May 23, 2002.

Abell Foundation
March 2002

The ever-useful Abell Foundation has just issued this blunt, alarming report on the education disaster at the intersection of Baltimore's moribund school system and the troubled community college that receives a large fraction of that system's graduates. Anybody concerned about the reform of urban education at either the K-12 level or the postsecondary level and, especially, at the difficulties where they're supposed to mesh, will do well to read this bleak, hard-hitting account. You can find both a short version and a long version on the Foundation's website at www.abell.org. (Both are in PDF format.)

Council of Chief State School Officers
April 2002 (draft)

The Council of Chief State School Officers recently produced this 45-page draft paper on states' responsibilities under the new NCLB legislation. Addressing Titles I, II and III of the Act, it sets forth in a clear, factual and detailed way what states must do by when to comply with these multitudinous and complex requirements. You'll find a PDF version at http://www.ccsso.org/pdfs/NCLB2002.pdf.

Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
April 2002

This useful ten-page review of charter-school research literature was published by the University of Pennsylvania-based Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) and written by Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler of Rutgers University. It's straightforward and fair-minded, useful to anyone seeking a fast overview of what's been learned to date by umpteen studies of charter schools. Be warned, though, that, on just about all the important issues, the evidence they've gathered is ambiguous, inconclusive or simply mixed. You can find it on the web at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rb35.pdf. A longer version (which I've not had the opportunity to review) will be available next week at http://www.cpre.org.

Noelle C. Griffin and Priscilla Wohlstetter, Teachers College Record
April 2001

Through a series of focus groups-including charter school founders/directors, administrators and teachers-the authors investigated 17 charter schools and the key instructional and organizational practices that they established in their start-up phase. Specifically, the authors looked at the experiences of these schools-six schools each in Boston and Los Angeles; and five schools in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area-in developing an instructional/curricular program, an accountability system, and school management/leadership processes. According to the authors (scholars at the University of Southern California), the charter school personnel interviewed found it difficult to develop coherent instructional programs. Many struggled with the "make versus buy" dilemma-should the school create its own instructional program from scratch or buy a pre-existing package that could be implemented quickly? The schools in the study tended to have a "pioneer" ethos that led them to create their own. This was time-consuming of course, and often collided with the realities of running a charter school: budget issues, relevant district, state, and federal policies, insurance, meals, security, custodians, substitutes, special education issues, and bus companies. As one school administrator lamented, "The logistics can kill you. The smallest part of my time goes to teaching and learning issues." As a result, many of these schools lacked a well-developed structure. "We limped through the first year in our approach to math-we had no textbook, no formal curriculum, and no one in charge of making those decisions," observed one school administrator. As for developing an accountability system, the authors discovered that there were strong feelings of informal accountability to the local school community, especially parents and to students. Yet teachers in many of the schools felt outright hostility and derision towards external accountability. One school leader stated bluntly, "We buck the accountability plan. I simply say I don't know state regulations." When it came to developing school management/leadership processes, many of the school leaders exhibited an "outlaw mentality." They saw themselves as fighting what they perceived as the ills of American public education, and this attitude appeared to generate and sustain commitment to the charter school. An elementary school administrator summed it up this way: "We're all here for a purpose...we're all here together because we chose to be." Although this article is more than a year old, it is worth reading if you want to appreciate the challenges facing those entrepreneurs struggling to make charter schools work. To see the report for yourself, go to www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentID=10722.

Timothy A. Hacsi
March 2002

This new book by Harvard ed school researcher Timothy A. Hacsi tours the reader through five contentious education policy questions (does Headstart work, does bilingual education work, does class size matter, is social promotion a good or bad thing, will spending more on schools make them better) and comes to the earth-shattering conclusion that politicians wrestling with these matters have not always based their decisions on what Hacsi would judge to be the best social science evidence. In fairness, he acknowledges that much of that evidence isn't really very good, that many education program evaluations are flawed, and that in many cases the best available answer isn't yes or no but, rather, "depends on how it's done." For the most part, however, he places greater faith in experts than in public opinion or the priority judgments of elected officials, and on several of these contentious issues he comes down firmly on the higher-spending side of the debate. While he doesn't quite finger a "great right wing conspiracy" for manipulating the other side, he comes close. I doubt that this book will put an end to any of these arguments, but by reading it you can at least get a sense of what's being argued about. Published by the Harvard University Press, the ISBN is 0674007441, it's 260 pages long, and you can get it through a bookseller or obtain additional information from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HACCHI.html.