The Education Gadfly Weekly

Council of the Great City Schools
March 2003

In its now-annual summary of student performance data in many of the nation's largest urban districts, the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) seeks to answer two fundamental questions: "Are urban schools improving academically?" and "Are urban schools closing achievement gaps?" As in the previous two editions, the answer for most districts is yes, though the challenge remains great. In looking at these data - this report is a statistician's dream - it's clear that some urban districts are making commendable academic progress but others aren't. There's plenty here to chew on - and considerable variance in available data. Dallas, for example, has data on grades 3-8 every year since 1994 and a separate section on the achievement gap. Detroit, by comparison, has data only for grades 4 and 7 in reading, and no separate breakout showing the achievement gap. Such differences expose how much work some states still have to do to align their assessment systems with the requirements of No Child Left Behind. For a copy, proceed to http://www.cgcs.org/reports/beat_the_oddsIII.html.

John U. Ogbu
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
2003

Much has already been written about this interesting and timely book by Berkeley sociologist John U. Ogbu. Subtitled "a study of academic disengagement," it explores why middle-class black youngsters in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio don't do as well in school as their white classmates - or as well as recent immigrants, including those from Africa. The gaps that motivated the study are wide. For example, on state proficiency tests, white 8th graders in Shaker Heights passed at rates averaging 94% while their African-American classmates averaged 61%. High school grade point averages were 3.27 for white males and 3.42 for white females compared with 1.99 and 2.42 for blacks. And so forth. Yet this is a highly regarded public-school system, not one in crisis. What's going on? Ogbu's analysis is perceptive. He attributes the problem partly to schools but mostly to "academic disengagement" among black youngsters AND to numerous community factors, both within the black community and in the broader Shaker Heights context. But he cuts through a lot of conventional explanations and doesn't dwell just on efforts to fix the schools. Indeed, many of his gap-closing recommendations focus on what ought to be done by black parents and their community to put greater emphasis on educational success and provide greater support for youngsters. At a time when the U.S. is concerned with closing the achievement gap, this book is a needed reminder that, while there is much that school systems can do to help accomplish that worthy goal, many other things must be done outside the school setting if success is to occur. The ISBN is 080584516X and further information can be obtained at https://www.erlbaum.com/shop/tek9.asp?pg=products&specific=0-8058-4516-X.

Robert Holland, The Lexington Institute
March 2003

In this short report, Robert Holland argues that charter schools can play a unique role in character education because parents and students can choose the approach that appeals to them, sidestepping the divisive questions that surround character education in public schools. The author highlights several interesting character education programs in charter schools, including the Character Counts program used at the Stepping Stones Academy in Phoenix, which emphasizes six traits called Pillars of Character; the "Literacy and Values" program used at Red Bank Charter School in New Jersey, which uses literature to emphasize values and character traits; and the National Heritage Academies, which each month emphasize a different character trait based on such Cardinal Virtues as justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. To get a copy, go to http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/education/0303.pdf.

Policy Analysis for California Education
April 2003

You need not read much further than the title of this report to spot the authors' anti-charter leanings. While they cite national data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), what they do with it is focus on disparities in school inputs, based on the long-discredited assumption that more inputs yield greater achievement. Everybody knows that charter schools are under-funded, compared with regular public schools and, while it's good to have charter critics acknowledge this, it's not so good when they use this fact to try to persuade readers that charter schools are therefore ineffective educational institutions - a case this study never proves. Worse, they ignore the essential logic of the charter idea itself, namely that these schools OUGHT to be different from the conventional public schools to which they are alternatives. Instead, they fault charters for being different! Teacher certification is perhaps the most egregious example. In states where charter schools are free to hire whomever they like, school operators relish the opportunity to staff their classrooms - as private schools staff theirs - with knowledgeable individuals who didn't attend ed schools. Yet Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller and his PACE colleagues slam them for hiring "uncredentialed" teachers, as if there were some equivalence between certification and effectiveness! PACE also criticizes charters for "failing to identify children with special learning needs" and cites as evidence the fact that predominantly black charter schools are less likely to identify students as learning disabled. Given the well known "over-identification" problem that minority youngsters encounter in regular public schools, it seems that such statistics could be evidence of charters' success. But the PACE crew cannot countenance schools that deviate from the norm, even when the norm is flawed. If you want to see this skewed report for yourself, go to http://pace.berkeley.edu/Chartersummary.pdf.

Krista Kafer, The Heritage Foundation
March 26, 2003

The latest in an annual series from the Heritage Foundation, this 18-pager by Krista Kafer is a useful wrap-up of state and federal developments of the past year on the school choice front. The author terms 2002 a "momentous year for the school choice movement." Construing choice broadly, her report includes summaries of research, projections of legislative prospects and various recommendations. You can find it at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/bg1639.cfm.

Patricia M. Lines, The ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management
2003

Over the past several years, as the number of home-schooled children has risen, so has the number of school districts that have worked to create partnerships with home-schooling families. In this book, home-school expert Pat Lines reports on successful practices of states and districts experimenting with such partnerships and offers guidance for policymakers seeking to increase the educational resources available to home-schooling families. For ordering information, go to http://eric.uoregon.edu/publications/action.lasso?database=products&-Response=detail.fmt&-token.start=&ProductID=EMOSHB.

Now that a scientific consensus has been reached on how best to teach children to decode words, the time has come to move on to challenge of boosting their reading comprehension. The Spring 2003 issue of American Educator focuses on this topic. The lead article, by E.D. Hirsch, explains how weak comprehension ruins poor children's chances to achieve academic success. Kate Walsh of the National Council for Teacher Quality looks at how elementary textbooks fail to teach the kind of sustained building of word and domain knowledge that's essential for increased reading comprehension. Other articles review research on poor youngster's fourth-grade slump in literacy development and on the vast gap between the number of words heard by three-year-olds depending on whether they are living in wealthy or poor households.

"Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge-of Words and the World," by E.D. Hirsch; "Lost Opportunity," by Kate Walsh, "Poor Children's Fourth-Grade Slump," by Jeanne Chall and Vicki Jacobs; "The Early Catastrophe," by Betty Hart and Todd Risley; and other articles are available at http://www.aft.org/american_educator/.

After reading experts criticized Month by Month Phonics, the reading curriculum that he had originally selected for citywide implementation, on grounds that it lacked evidence of effectiveness, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein has quietly decided to supplement it with a phonics-intensive program developed by Voyager Expanded Learning and based on sound reading research. City officials also announced last week that 119 additional schools would be exempted from all or part of the city's new standard reading and math curricula next year, along with the 209 schools that were previously granted waivers. The additional exemptions resulted from an appeals process to which 233 schools applied. In an article in the New York Daily News, Diane Ravitch notes that the city could have exempted even more schools from the new curriculum without lowering its standards - arguing that there are more good schools in the city than the chancellor has recognized.

"More intensive reading program is added for struggling pupils," by Abby Goodnough, The New York Times, April 5, 2003

"More schools are exempted from standard city curriculum," by David Herszenhorn, The New York Times, April 3, 2003

"Schools better than Klein lets on," by Diane Ravitch, New York Daily News, April 9, 2003

Kaplan, Inc. will open a "virtual" school of education in 2004, to be led by former New York City chancellor Harold Levy. The school hopes to attract working adults and midcareer professionals who will take their classes via distance learning and also have clinical experiences in K-12 classrooms. It aspires to draw able people into teaching by eliminating some traditional barriers.

"Kaplan announces plan to move into teacher education," by Goldie Blumnenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2003 (subscription required)

Last week, the Colorado Senate narrowly passed a pilot voucher bill that, when signed, will mark the first voucher plan enacted since last year's landmark Zelman decision. The Colorado House, which passed a similar version of the bill on February 19, is reviewing the Senate amendments. Barring major changes, Governor Bill Owens has pledged to sign the measure.

The Colorado plan would allow struggling, low-income students in low-achieving school districts to use state money to pay tuition at private or parochial schools. Only students eligible for free/reduced lunches would be eligible for vouchers, and students in grades 4-12 would also have to score "unsatisfactory" on the state standardized tests to qualify. To help offset the monetary hit for school districts whose students switch from public to private schools, districts that lose students would continue to receive as much as 25% of each voucher student's state funding allotment. Despite this provision, and the likelihood that relatively few Colorado youngsters would actually benefit from the narrowly drafted law, the Colorado Education Association has criticized it for threatening to drain upwards of $193 million in state funding from public schools at a time when districts are already facing a severe budget crunch.

One potentially sticky wicket could make a court challenge against this voucher program viable despite of Zelman. Colorado's state constitution includes a 19th Century "Blaine Amendment" that prohibits funds passing through, to, or even in the vicinity of a religious sect. If the new program is challenged under this provision, as seems likely, the Supreme Court might be forced to declare either the program or the Amendment unconstitutional.

Texas is vying to be the third state (after Florida and potentially Colorado) to offer a statewide voucher program for students in struggling schools. A voucher bill cleared the Lone Star State's House education committee last week. Under its provisions, vouchers would initially be available only to low-income students in 11 urban districts, although proponents hope eventually to make them more widely accessible. For now, the measure also limits the number of participants to 5% of eligible students per district.

In other voucher news, Milwaukee school board veteran John Gardner last week lost his seat to Tom Balistreri, a former high school principal backed by the teachers union. Liberal Democrat Gardner had joined Mayor John Norquist in 1990 to push for legislative approval of Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program. His loss will shift the school board's balance of power, leaving pro-voucher members one vote short of a majority. Many believe this will jeopardize the long-term sustainability of the city's 12 year-old voucher program.

In the District of Columbia, school board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz announced a sudden change of heart last week. After criticizing President Bush's proposed DC voucher program when first announced, she has now voiced support for such a program (with some strings attached) via an op-ed in the Washington Post. [For Cafritz's initial reaction to the voucher program, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#351.] The move surprised and angered many DC government officials. - Kathleen Porter

"Vouchers gain an early foothold," by Greg Toppo, USA Today, April 2, 2003

"Colorado to be first in school vouchers," by George Archibald, The Washington Times, April 3, 2003

"Ed-biz: Colorado vouchers to get 'Blaine'," by Gregory Fossedal, UPI, April 1, 2003

"Voucher bill clears a hurdle," by Clay Robinson, The Houston Chronicle, April 4, 2003

"A Capital Idea," editorial, The Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2003 (free registration required)

"Making the most of vouchers," by Peggy Cooper-Cafritz, The Washington Post, March 29, 2003

Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Kansas, Vermont, Iowa and Idaho are presently weighing proposals to reduce the number of school districts within their borders by consolidating some of them into larger units.

Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, responding to a court decision that made the state responsible for providing children with an adequate education, has urged that the number of school districts in Arkansas be cut from 310 to no more than 116. In Arizona, new state school superintendent Tom Horne said that consolidation of his state's 220+ districts would ease administrative costs. In South Dakota, the House education committee recently considered a bill to reduce districts from 176 to 30. In Kansas, a proposal to slash the number from 303 to 30 was being studied. Vermont's legislature is weighing a proposal to shrink the number from 60 to 15. Iowa is pondering financial incentives to encourage consolidations. (In Michigan, they already get a $50 per pupil bonus.) In Idaho, a similar proposal is before the House education committee. And of course New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has effectively merged that city's many "community" districts into a single centralized system.

But this pendulum swings both ways. Oregon is considering proposals to break up large school districts. Los Angeles has often been urged to shear the mammoth LAUSD into 30 or so parts. In Nevada, plans are afoot to break up the huge Clark County (Las Vegas) school district. And Wyoming's legislature recently defeated an attempt at more district consolidation.

Does it matter? Yes, the history of public education suggests that district consolidation - and the inevitable school consolidation that follows - are generally bad ideas. Though proponents promise lower costs and stronger student performance, in practice neither seems to occur. Worse, over the long haul, consolidation sucks power away from parents, students, and local influence into more centralized political arrangements in which teacher unions and other special interests have even more clout. The result has been higher, not lower, per pupil costs and worse education. In the jargon of Economics 101, any economies gained by movements down cost curves have been more than offset by upward shifts in these same curves.

The number of public school districts in the U.S. shrank from 117,000 in 1940 to 15,000 in 2000. The number of public schools fell from 233,000 in the late 1930's to 91,000 in 2000. These two developments caused the average number of pupils per district to rise from 217 in 1940 to 3159 in 2000 and the average school to swell from 127 to 521 pupils.

As everyone knows, these consolidations were accompanied not by amazing new efficiencies but by rising per pupil costs - and costs borne more and more by non-local sources. From the end of World War II to today, real per pupil spending sextupled, even as the local share of public-school funding dwindled from 80% (early 1900s) to 45.4 percent in 2000.

Power follows money to its source. In education, that has meant following it upward to places where adult interest groups are better able both to secure further hikes in school funding and to divert much of the increment toward themselves and their members.

Besides price-escalation, consolidation discourages competition and educational diversity. Caroline Hoxby and Sam Peltzman have found that it adversely affects both the cost of education and the performance of students. Peltzman discovered that deterioration in pupil performance was greatest where the shift in funding from local to state sources was greatest. He also found that the upward movement of power added to union influence.

Consider teacher pay and work rules. Teacher unions bargain at the district level. As districts become larger, negotiators on both sides are farther removed from direct knowledge of individual teachers and schools. District-wide pay schedules and work rules become more detached from the performance of real teachers and schools. Veteran teachers transfer out of inner-city schools. The ultimate union objective is statewide salary schedules and work rules, which already exist in North Carolina and Washington State. These are more readily controlled from the top. A favorite trick is to mandate statewide minimum starting wages that force up entire salary grids.

Perhaps this would still be worth doing if students learned more but, by and large, they have not, at least not lately. The data show gradually improving pupil performance until the early 1960s. From then until the early 1980s, however, scores plummeted, such that, by the end of this period, high school graduates were about one and one-half years behind their predecessors of the early 1960s. There has since been some recovery in scores, but well below what it would have been had the pre-1960s trend continued.

Over the same period, community colleges grew in no small part because they provided remedial help. Moreover, half the private schools in existence in 1994 were founded in the three decades immediately preceding. It is at least plausible that both developments responded to public school and district consolidation and the accompanying declines in pupil performance.

Why should this be? Effective-schools research indicates that achievement is stronger where schools establish a clear identity for students - a community of interest. Yet consolidation pushes the other way. High schools, in particular, became shopping malls. Larger schools necessarily had less sense of community. While diversity may be a plus in other ways, it probably does not square with improved student performance. What's more, all of this occurred as the larger society was fracturing. Ironically, these developments led both to greater homogeneity among schools and more diversity within schools. Both developments eroded student performance, the former by reducing competition among schools and the latter by destroying strong school identities.

Big schools are a problem for other reasons. Many people judge the optimal school size to be about 300-400 students at the elementary level and 400-800 in secondary institutions. Yet fourth-fifths of U.S. elementary students are in schools larger than 400 students and nearly three-quarters of secondary pupils attend schools bigger than 800. By contrast, higher-performing private schools are typically less than half the size of their public counterparts.

Bigger doesn't mean better. More consolidation will push both education costs and student performance in unwanted directions. State policymakers should take note.

John T. Wenders is Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Idaho and a Senior Fellow at The Commonwealth Foundation

Parents, principals, and policymakers who want to know what research shows about the effectiveness of the Core Knowledge (CK) curriculum will find a useful summary in an article in the Core Knowledge Foundation newsletter. It summarizes three large studies that compare the academic performance of students in CK schools with pupils in control groups. In Oklahoma City, students taught in CK classrooms outperformed their peers in other schools on both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests of reading, vocabulary, math, and social studies. In another study, students at twelve schools with well-implemented CK programs outperformed a control group (though youngsters whose schools had a low level of CK implementation did not). The article also summarizes research showing that students with greater cultural literacy tend to do better in school and to achieve higher scores on standardized tests, suggesting that schools that neglect content knowledge in favor of teaching children abstract skills may be doing them a disservice.

"How Do We Know Core Knowledge Works?" by Matthew Davis, Common Knowledge, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2003 (Not available online. To receive a copy, e-mail Chip Shields at [email protected])

Just five years after California voters approved Proposition 227, which replaced bilingual education with English-only programs for most California LEP students, the number of English learners who scored "proficient' on the state's language test has risen significantly. Such scores among youngsters enrolled in English-only programs rose from 9 to 30 percent between 2001 and 2002, while students who remained in bilingual programs (because their parents sought a waiver from the new regulations) went from 3 to 16 percent proficient.

"English-only students do better on state test," by Nanette Asimov, San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 2003

Last month, City Journal published a long article by Justin Kaplowitz, a former Teach for America corps member whose teaching career was abruptly ended after one year when a disgruntled parent filed a frivolous $20 million lawsuit charging that Kaplowitz had hit her child [seehttp://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=8#371 for more information]. An article in Sunday'sWashington Post Magazine profiles Kaplowitz along with Nick Ehrmann, a second TFA teacher at the same troubled District of Columbia elementary school. While Kaplowitz struggled and ultimately failed to control the unruly children assigned to his class, Ehrmann managed to gain control of his classroom and earn the respect of his students. In a related article, Jay Mathews outlines the changes needed if inner city schools are to become places where teachers can be effective.

"Pass/Fail," by Marc Fisher, The Washington Post Magazine, April 6, 2003

"Finding a lifeline for teachers in trouble," by Jay Mathews, Washingtonpost.com, April 8, 2003

Council of the Great City Schools
March 2003

In its now-annual summary of student performance data in many of the nation's largest urban districts, the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) seeks to answer two fundamental questions: "Are urban schools improving academically?" and "Are urban schools closing achievement gaps?" As in the previous two editions, the answer for most districts is yes, though the challenge remains great. In looking at these data - this report is a statistician's dream - it's clear that some urban districts are making commendable academic progress but others aren't. There's plenty here to chew on - and considerable variance in available data. Dallas, for example, has data on grades 3-8 every year since 1994 and a separate section on the achievement gap. Detroit, by comparison, has data only for grades 4 and 7 in reading, and no separate breakout showing the achievement gap. Such differences expose how much work some states still have to do to align their assessment systems with the requirements of No Child Left Behind. For a copy, proceed to http://www.cgcs.org/reports/beat_the_oddsIII.html.

John U. Ogbu
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
2003

Much has already been written about this interesting and timely book by Berkeley sociologist John U. Ogbu. Subtitled "a study of academic disengagement," it explores why middle-class black youngsters in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio don't do as well in school as their white classmates - or as well as recent immigrants, including those from Africa. The gaps that motivated the study are wide. For example, on state proficiency tests, white 8th graders in Shaker Heights passed at rates averaging 94% while their African-American classmates averaged 61%. High school grade point averages were 3.27 for white males and 3.42 for white females compared with 1.99 and 2.42 for blacks. And so forth. Yet this is a highly regarded public-school system, not one in crisis. What's going on? Ogbu's analysis is perceptive. He attributes the problem partly to schools but mostly to "academic disengagement" among black youngsters AND to numerous community factors, both within the black community and in the broader Shaker Heights context. But he cuts through a lot of conventional explanations and doesn't dwell just on efforts to fix the schools. Indeed, many of his gap-closing recommendations focus on what ought to be done by black parents and their community to put greater emphasis on educational success and provide greater support for youngsters. At a time when the U.S. is concerned with closing the achievement gap, this book is a needed reminder that, while there is much that school systems can do to help accomplish that worthy goal, many other things must be done outside the school setting if success is to occur. The ISBN is 080584516X and further information can be obtained at https://www.erlbaum.com/shop/tek9.asp?pg=products&specific=0-8058-4516-X.

Krista Kafer, The Heritage Foundation
March 26, 2003

The latest in an annual series from the Heritage Foundation, this 18-pager by Krista Kafer is a useful wrap-up of state and federal developments of the past year on the school choice front. The author terms 2002 a "momentous year for the school choice movement." Construing choice broadly, her report includes summaries of research, projections of legislative prospects and various recommendations. You can find it at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Education/bg1639.cfm.

Patricia M. Lines, The ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management
2003

Over the past several years, as the number of home-schooled children has risen, so has the number of school districts that have worked to create partnerships with home-schooling families. In this book, home-school expert Pat Lines reports on successful practices of states and districts experimenting with such partnerships and offers guidance for policymakers seeking to increase the educational resources available to home-schooling families. For ordering information, go to http://eric.uoregon.edu/publications/action.lasso?database=products&-Response=detail.fmt&-token.start=&ProductID=EMOSHB.

Policy Analysis for California Education
April 2003

You need not read much further than the title of this report to spot the authors' anti-charter leanings. While they cite national data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), what they do with it is focus on disparities in school inputs, based on the long-discredited assumption that more inputs yield greater achievement. Everybody knows that charter schools are under-funded, compared with regular public schools and, while it's good to have charter critics acknowledge this, it's not so good when they use this fact to try to persuade readers that charter schools are therefore ineffective educational institutions - a case this study never proves. Worse, they ignore the essential logic of the charter idea itself, namely that these schools OUGHT to be different from the conventional public schools to which they are alternatives. Instead, they fault charters for being different! Teacher certification is perhaps the most egregious example. In states where charter schools are free to hire whomever they like, school operators relish the opportunity to staff their classrooms - as private schools staff theirs - with knowledgeable individuals who didn't attend ed schools. Yet Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller and his PACE colleagues slam them for hiring "uncredentialed" teachers, as if there were some equivalence between certification and effectiveness! PACE also criticizes charters for "failing to identify children with special learning needs" and cites as evidence the fact that predominantly black charter schools are less likely to identify students as learning disabled. Given the well known "over-identification" problem that minority youngsters encounter in regular public schools, it seems that such statistics could be evidence of charters' success. But the PACE crew cannot countenance schools that deviate from the norm, even when the norm is flawed. If you want to see this skewed report for yourself, go to http://pace.berkeley.edu/Chartersummary.pdf.

Robert Holland, The Lexington Institute
March 2003

In this short report, Robert Holland argues that charter schools can play a unique role in character education because parents and students can choose the approach that appeals to them, sidestepping the divisive questions that surround character education in public schools. The author highlights several interesting character education programs in charter schools, including the Character Counts program used at the Stepping Stones Academy in Phoenix, which emphasizes six traits called Pillars of Character; the "Literacy and Values" program used at Red Bank Charter School in New Jersey, which uses literature to emphasize values and character traits; and the National Heritage Academies, which each month emphasize a different character trait based on such Cardinal Virtues as justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. To get a copy, go to http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/education/0303.pdf.