The Education Gadfly Weekly

Krista Kafer, Heritage Foundation, October 2001

There's no shortage of advice being directed toward House and Senate conferees charged with hashing out the details of legislation to reauthorize ESEA.  Two recent mini-papers in the Heritage Foundation's Backgrounder series - both authored by senior education policy analyst Krista Kafer - offer policy prescriptions that conferees would do well to heed.  The first paper, "Target Education Dollars to Children with the Greatest Need," (October 2, 2001) makes the case for program consolidation, arguing that local flexibility to target funds is far likelier to aid low-income and disadvantaged students than scattered, well-intentioned programs mandated from Washington. (Included are lists of all the education programs funded under current law, those contained in the President's proposed FY 2002 budget, and the far larger number of programs contained in the House and Senate versions of the ESEA bill.)  The second paper, "Wasting Education Dollars: The Women's Educational Equity Act," spotlights one program that Kafer believes should go the way of the dinosaur - the Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA).  Born 27 years ago on the premise that teaching and learning practices were inherently biased against girls, the program seeks to cure a problem that no longer exists; it is boys, not girls, who today fall short on most measures of achievement.  We can no longer afford to waste precious resources on outdated and ineffectual programs, Kafer writes; instead, we must focus our dollars and efforts on those who most need our help - poor kids.  Both papers are easily accessible online at http://www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1481.html ("Target Education Dollars to Children with the Greatest Need," October 2, 2001) and http://www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1490.html ("Wasting Education Dollars: The Women's Educational Equity Act," October 11, 2001).

Cato Institute, September 10, 2001

The Cato Institute recently released a pair of reports in its Briefing Papers series detailing the successes of longstanding school voucher systems in Maine and Vermont. The programs, similar in structure and administration, have existed for approximately 130 years in these states. The Maine program grants tuition stipends - redeemable at public and private schools - to families living in towns too small or remote to support their own public school systems. In accord with the theory that the more experience people have with vouchers, the more they are inclined to support them, the citizens of Maine have repeatedly voted to continue the program, which has been deemed "the most valued attribute" of living in the Pine Tree State. The Vermont report finds similar levels of support for the Green Mountain State's program.  Both reports include responses to many of the arguments made by school choice opponents. Lessons from Vermont: 132-Year-Old Voucher Program Rebuts Critics, by Libby Sternberg, is available at http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-067es.html; for Lessons from Maine: Education Vouchers for Students since 1873, by Frank Heller, see http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-066es.html. Hard copies are available for $2 apiece from the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001; 202-842-0200; fax 202-842-3490.

The Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment, October 2001

The National Education Association and four other mainstream public-school groups have just issued this 32-page document, based on the deliberations of something called "The Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment." Emeritus UCLA professor (and testing critic) James Popham chaired it, joined by such prominent education Panglosses as David Berliner. The group settled on nine "requirements for states to design tests that promote better teaching and learning." These include several that are unobjectionable (e.g. making sure that state academic standards are clear, disaggregating the reporting of test results). Some are worthy if expensive (e.g. providing "accommodations and alternative methods of assessment...for students who need them"). Some are predictable (e.g. more professional development for teachers) and some dilatory (e.g. giving test developers three years to produce new statewide tests). One recommendation, though, could make trouble for standards-based education reform. It asks states to "prioritize" their content standards and focus their testing only on those with high priority.  Besides using that awful word "prioritize", this is not a very wise recommendation. Sure, some states have excessively broad and ambitious academic standards. But to pick and choose among those standards on grounds that some are truly important while others are expendable, is, in effect, to shrink the universe of skills and knowledge that states actually want their children to acquire - and that they're going to hold schools accountable for teaching. This seems not very different from making the tests easier - by making them cover less ground, or having only some of the ground "count." If you'd like a copy, surf to http://www.nmsa.org/ and follow the prompts under the second item there ("Smarter Testing - New Guide for States").

Hugh B. Price, 2001

Hugh B. Price is president of the National Urban League and a thoughtful, impassioned education reformer. He and the Urban League have published this 400-page collection of his speeches and writings. About a quarter of it (7 entries) is devoted to "urban education." Much of what's here is perceptive and tough-minded. The rest of the volume tackles other topics from race relations to affirmative action to police "misconduct." If you'd like to see it, the ISBN is 0914758950, and the price is $24.95 plus $4.50 shipping. To order a copy, contact the National Urban League's Publications Department at 212-558-5345.

Frank Martinelli, Charter Friends National Network, September 2001

Community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs) are increasingly diving into the charter school movement by supporting, designing, launching and/or operating their own schools.  Frank Martinelli, president of the Center for Public Skills Training in Milwaukee, documents the work of these budding alliances between charter schools and their founding community organizations in this forty-nine-page guide to fostering and sustaining healthy "CBO-linked" relationships.  The concept of linkage seems promising, as CBOs bring expertise in budgeting, personnel policy, fund-raising and financial management skills to the table, freeing charter school leaders to focus on things like curriculum and instruction. The report includes detailed charts on start-up activities, levels of partnership and degrees of responsibility along with informative interviews of the leaders and organizers of CBO-linked charter schools.  Check it out at http://www.uscharterschools.org/gb/community/index.htm or request a copy by emailing [email protected] or calling 651-644-6115.

Homeschooling is hot and a new book, Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, by Mitchell Stevens takes a fresh look at where the movement came from and what it means for American education and culture.  Stevens, a professor of sociology at Hamilton College, spent ten years interviewing and observing homeschooling families and reading their publications.  If you don't have time to read books, a thoughtful review by Margaret Talbot appears in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Among the interesting points she (and, presumably, the book) makes: that homeschooling is more modern and forward-looking than it is old-timey; that, while conservative Christians tend to dominate homeschooling today, the movement's pioneers were sixties-style hippies and radicals who met one another at the food co-op; and that homeschooling's appeal to countless mothers is that it offers intellectual outlets and entrepreneurial opportunities for women whose goal is full-time motherhood but who want to use their education in systematic ways and yearn to be recognized as more than "just moms." Talbot concludes that we don't need to worry about the academic or social skills of homeschooled kids, and that homeschooling poses no real threat to social cohesion. See "The New Counterculture," by Margaret Talbot, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2001. Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement, by Mitchell Stevens, is published by Princeton University Press and can be ordered for $24.95 at http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7135.html.

Launched a decade ago by reform-minded corporate CEOs, the New American Schools (NAS) initiative was meant to kindle a revolution in American education. Ten years later, however, rather than igniting change, it has largely reverted to the norms of the education establishment, according to a new report by historian Jeffrey Mirel which was released by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation this week.  The Evolution of the New American Schools: From Revolution to Mainstream traces the development of this ambitious venture from its 1991 origins in the "America 2000" education-reform initiative of President George Bush, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, and Deputy Secretary David Kearns. By 2001, New American Schools whole-school reform designs were in place in more than 3,500 schools, but along the way, Mirel argues, the organization shed its revolutionary colors and began to turn gray. According to the report, NAS allied itself early on with established educators who embraced the ideas and practices of the progressive education movement, which has long been the dominant paradigm of American education.  The Evolution of the New American Schools describes how NAS and the whole-school approach to school reform have become fixtures of the U.S. education landscape and raises questions about how desirable that is. For more, see The Evolution of the New American Schools: From Revolution to Mainstream, by Jeffrey Mirel, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, October 2001.

The education bill that Congress is likely to pass is a disaster in the making, and the White House and Capitol Hill insiders have known this for months, asserts veteran education journalist Tom Toch in this month's Washington Monthly. Still, the administration continues to press Congress to pass a bill by year's end - and Chairman Boehner says that this will indeed happen. As written, Toch believes, the legislation would hurt the nation's students more than it helps them. He sees a way out, but only if only Republicans and Democrats were to do something unlikely and join forces behind an accountability plan based on a national test of reading and math. Toch catalogues a long list of problems that have been identified with the accountability parts of the education bill now on the Hill and explains how value-added analysis of the results from national tests could make those problems go away.  While national tests are famously opposed by both left and the right, Toch believes that they are within political reach now because of how badly people want accountability, how flawed the alternative is (federal accountability based on state standards and tests), and because of the public's warmth towards national initiatives since September 11th.  Read more at "Bush's Big Test," by Thomas Toch, The Washington Monthly, November 2001

Begging your leave, this week I shall acquaint you with a new report from the wing of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation that's chiefly concerned with education reform in Dayton, Ohio, where Mr. Fordham lived, where I grew up, and where we focus our on-the-ground efforts (as opposed to the national policy research issues that you usually read about in this space).

Dayton Education in 2001: The Views of Citizens and Parents (available in full - in a PDF version - on our website at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/dayton_2001.pdf) reports the findings of an August survey of 1455 residents of that Midwestern city, including approximately equal numbers of public-school parents, charter-school parents, private-school parents, and adults with no children in school. Statistically significant data are available from each group - and for comparisons among them. To our knowledge, this is the first time any survey has made possible a three-way comparison of public, private and charter school parents in any community. (The survey was scientifically constructed and professionally administered by Paragon Opinion Research.)

Dayton isn't a big place, but it warrants the attention of people interested in education reform. It's home to a sizable privately funded voucher program, one with promising evidence of academic gains for black youngsters. It's also home to one of America's liveliest charter-school programs, with upwards of fifteen percent of the city's children attending some 13 charter schools today - and several more in the pipeline for 2002. Though it also bears most of the marks of a troubled urban community - white flight, low test scores, high dropout rates, a dysfunctional school board, an obdurate teacher union - there's a lot of worthwhile reform occurring there.

The nearly 50 questions in the Dayton public opinion survey divided into three broad categories.

One set asked parents how satisfied they are with various dimensions of their children's current schools. The response pattern is fascinating, if perhaps predictable. On a host of criteria (teachers, discipline, safety, curriculum, parent involvement, etc.), private-school parents are the most satisfied, public-school parents are least satisfied, and charter parents turn up in the middle - though generally closer to private than public.

A second clutch of questions asked Dayton parents and non-parents about issues facing the local public school system and its leadership - the latter being especially timely since a key school board election will be held on November 6, an election with livelier competition among abler and more thoughtful candidates than has been seen in ages. These responses show Daytonians deeply troubled by many aspects of their school system. Most say that it's gotten worse in recent years, that its current leadership is not doing an adequate job, and that "bold reformers" should be elected to the open school-board seats.

The third cluster of questions probed Dayton residents' receptivity to a bundle of education reform ideas, including many deemed "controversial" within the profession and in national policy circles. Insofar as one can tell from comments on a telephone survey, Daytonians look like radical education reformers. For example, 83% favor requiring children to meet higher academic standards in order to be promoted or to graduate; 70% would give public-school principals greater control of their budgets and personnel; 67% favor "making it easier for professionals from other fields to become teachers"; a similar proportion would pay teachers more if their students make strong academic progress; three-quarters would pay more to teachers in shortage fields such as math and science; and nearly everyone in town would test (all) teachers to ensure that they know their subjects. Three out of four Dayton adults would require suburban schools to admit city youngsters if they have room (that's now up to individual districts under Ohio law); just 15% would scrap the city's lively charter-school program (the rest split between keeping it at its present size and expanding it); and a whopping 73% (including 77% of public-school parents) favor school vouchers (here phrased as "the use of government funds to send children to any school, including private and church-related schools.")

Dayton residents, in other words, sound like serious reformers, ready for sweeping changes in a public-school system that few think is doing a good job today. Will they vote that way two weeks hence? And will the would-be reformers among the candidates stick to their guns if elected? We shall see. Meanwhile, what about a similar survey in your favorite city?

PS: After five years of experience in education-reform philanthropy, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have distilled some lessons about the kinds of activities that we believe have greatest potential to effect serious change in education. Our advice (plus profiles of a dozen other philanthropists and some further musings on what we've tried and learned in Dayton) can be found in another new Fordham report, Making It Count: A Guide to High-Impact Education Philanthropy, also available on our website at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=39.

Two new books offer firsthand evidence that our high schools - even "high-achieving" schools in fancy suburbs - often aren't places where the focus is on learning.  For Doing School, Stanford ed school professor Denise Pope shadowed five honors students from a wealthy California suburb for a year. She observed them sacrificing sleep, health and social lives to their schoolwork, but the aim was getting A's rather than learning. Pope concludes that kids are caught in a "grade trap" that leads them to disengage from the learning process and compromise their values by scheming, lying and cheating - anything to get ahead.  Halfway across the country in suburban Prior Lake, Minnesota, journalist/author Elinor Burkett spent a year as a pseudo-student inside Prior Lake High School, attending classes and pep rallies and hanging out with students and administrators in a quest to find out what really goes on within the school walls.  More diary than book, Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School provides an insider's look at how things like zero-tolerance policies, grade inflation, the self-esteem movement and "teaching to the test" play out in actual schools, where teachers complain about being made "the clothing-and-drug police, the lateness brigade and the parent hand-holders."  Doing School by Denise Clark Pope, Yale University Press, October 2001, ISBN #0300090137.  Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School by Elinor Burkett, HarperCollins, October 2001, ISBN #0066211484. Both books are available at http://www.amazon.com.

Cato Institute, September 10, 2001

The Cato Institute recently released a pair of reports in its Briefing Papers series detailing the successes of longstanding school voucher systems in Maine and Vermont. The programs, similar in structure and administration, have existed for approximately 130 years in these states. The Maine program grants tuition stipends - redeemable at public and private schools - to families living in towns too small or remote to support their own public school systems. In accord with the theory that the more experience people have with vouchers, the more they are inclined to support them, the citizens of Maine have repeatedly voted to continue the program, which has been deemed "the most valued attribute" of living in the Pine Tree State. The Vermont report finds similar levels of support for the Green Mountain State's program.  Both reports include responses to many of the arguments made by school choice opponents. Lessons from Vermont: 132-Year-Old Voucher Program Rebuts Critics, by Libby Sternberg, is available at http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-067es.html; for Lessons from Maine: Education Vouchers for Students since 1873, by Frank Heller, see http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-066es.html. Hard copies are available for $2 apiece from the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001; 202-842-0200; fax 202-842-3490.

Frank Martinelli, Charter Friends National Network, September 2001

Community-based nonprofit organizations (CBOs) are increasingly diving into the charter school movement by supporting, designing, launching and/or operating their own schools.  Frank Martinelli, president of the Center for Public Skills Training in Milwaukee, documents the work of these budding alliances between charter schools and their founding community organizations in this forty-nine-page guide to fostering and sustaining healthy "CBO-linked" relationships.  The concept of linkage seems promising, as CBOs bring expertise in budgeting, personnel policy, fund-raising and financial management skills to the table, freeing charter school leaders to focus on things like curriculum and instruction. The report includes detailed charts on start-up activities, levels of partnership and degrees of responsibility along with informative interviews of the leaders and organizers of CBO-linked charter schools.  Check it out at http://www.uscharterschools.org/gb/community/index.htm or request a copy by emailing [email protected] or calling 651-644-6115.

Hugh B. Price, 2001

Hugh B. Price is president of the National Urban League and a thoughtful, impassioned education reformer. He and the Urban League have published this 400-page collection of his speeches and writings. About a quarter of it (7 entries) is devoted to "urban education." Much of what's here is perceptive and tough-minded. The rest of the volume tackles other topics from race relations to affirmative action to police "misconduct." If you'd like to see it, the ISBN is 0914758950, and the price is $24.95 plus $4.50 shipping. To order a copy, contact the National Urban League's Publications Department at 212-558-5345.

Krista Kafer, Heritage Foundation, October 2001

There's no shortage of advice being directed toward House and Senate conferees charged with hashing out the details of legislation to reauthorize ESEA.  Two recent mini-papers in the Heritage Foundation's Backgrounder series - both authored by senior education policy analyst Krista Kafer - offer policy prescriptions that conferees would do well to heed.  The first paper, "Target Education Dollars to Children with the Greatest Need," (October 2, 2001) makes the case for program consolidation, arguing that local flexibility to target funds is far likelier to aid low-income and disadvantaged students than scattered, well-intentioned programs mandated from Washington. (Included are lists of all the education programs funded under current law, those contained in the President's proposed FY 2002 budget, and the far larger number of programs contained in the House and Senate versions of the ESEA bill.)  The second paper, "Wasting Education Dollars: The Women's Educational Equity Act," spotlights one program that Kafer believes should go the way of the dinosaur - the Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA).  Born 27 years ago on the premise that teaching and learning practices were inherently biased against girls, the program seeks to cure a problem that no longer exists; it is boys, not girls, who today fall short on most measures of achievement.  We can no longer afford to waste precious resources on outdated and ineffectual programs, Kafer writes; instead, we must focus our dollars and efforts on those who most need our help - poor kids.  Both papers are easily accessible online at http://www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1481.html ("Target Education Dollars to Children with the Greatest Need," October 2, 2001) and http://www.heritage.org/library/backgrounder/bg1490.html ("Wasting Education Dollars: The Women's Educational Equity Act," October 11, 2001).

The Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment, October 2001

The National Education Association and four other mainstream public-school groups have just issued this 32-page document, based on the deliberations of something called "The Commission on Instructionally Supportive Assessment." Emeritus UCLA professor (and testing critic) James Popham chaired it, joined by such prominent education Panglosses as David Berliner. The group settled on nine "requirements for states to design tests that promote better teaching and learning." These include several that are unobjectionable (e.g. making sure that state academic standards are clear, disaggregating the reporting of test results). Some are worthy if expensive (e.g. providing "accommodations and alternative methods of assessment...for students who need them"). Some are predictable (e.g. more professional development for teachers) and some dilatory (e.g. giving test developers three years to produce new statewide tests). One recommendation, though, could make trouble for standards-based education reform. It asks states to "prioritize" their content standards and focus their testing only on those with high priority.  Besides using that awful word "prioritize", this is not a very wise recommendation. Sure, some states have excessively broad and ambitious academic standards. But to pick and choose among those standards on grounds that some are truly important while others are expendable, is, in effect, to shrink the universe of skills and knowledge that states actually want their children to acquire - and that they're going to hold schools accountable for teaching. This seems not very different from making the tests easier - by making them cover less ground, or having only some of the ground "count." If you'd like a copy, surf to http://www.nmsa.org/ and follow the prompts under the second item there ("Smarter Testing - New Guide for States").