The Education Gadfly Weekly

Edited by Joy A. Palmer
2001

"I'll tell you that one of my favorite fancies is to look at my family as a small world, to watch the progress of my little men, and, lately, to see how well the influence of my little women works upon them." The novelist and educator Louisa May Alcott shared this particular insight into the workings of human nature, but it is representative of the sort of things we all know but can't articulate as well as a writer like Alcott. Fifty Major Thinkers on Education is the first of two volumes of essays describing the impact of some of history's more profound thinkers on education and human nature. It's nicely varied. For those who advocate a rigorous academic education, there's the German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart who postulated a theory of education in the early 19th century that should be, "profound, precise and complete,' and the teaching of which must demand 'high standards' and 'rigorous thinking." For child-centered progressives, there is Herbert Spencer arguing that "Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible." Those who favor service learning as a way to merge academics with life will recognize the voice of John Dewey. Today, as public officials and educators across the country talk about the opportunities afforded in the first five years of life, it is interesting to learn about the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel. In 1840, he was struggling to come up with a term to describe his school for young children when one day during a walk he exclaimed to a colleague, "Eureka! Kindergarten shall the institute be called!" This book will benefit people who want to understand the roots of today's education thinking. It recalls Thomas Huxley's comment about Herbert Spencer: "He was the most original of thinkers though he never invented a new thought." Fifty Major Thinkers on Education makes it clear that those of us who work in the world of education in the 21st century can only hope to add clarity and new variations to insights long ago uncovered. The ISBN is 0-415-23126-4; the publisher is Routledge. To order, call 212-216-7800 or visit http://www.routledge.com.

Edited by Iris Weiss, Michael Knapp, Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill, National Research Council
2001

Here we have yet another National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report on education, this one paid for by the National Science Foundation and edited by two academics who served on the committee that did the study (Iris Weiss and Michael Knapp) and two National Academy staffers (Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill). It starts with the so-called "national standards" in math, science and technology, all of them developed and issued by self-governing and sometimes self-interested private groups (the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Research Council itself, and a less familiar outfit called the International Technology Education Association.) The basic question addressed here is how to determine what difference those standards have made in the U.S. education system and what effects they've had on student learning. Yet that question stays unanswered. This volume simply builds an elaborate "framework" within which others can seek to answer it and by which people can interpret studies claiming to answer it. This makes for an unsatisfying document, more a guide to "how to look at this question" than an actual look. Meager as it is, there's still a problem with this approach, which resembles members of a track team devising the criteria by which their own performance will be judged in the high jump and relay race. There's much overlap between the developers of the standards being discussed and the authors and overseers of this report, which helps explain the loving stance that it takes toward the standards. In the case of the NCTM math standards, for example, we observe that Gail Burrill, one of the editors of this report, is a former NCTM president. The science standards discussed in this NAS/NRC publication were themselves developed and promulgated by the NAS/NRC. And the Academy extensively reviewed the technology standards before they were released. So there's something deeply self-referential here. There's also something reverential about it. Despite the fact that these are privately developed, voluntary standards, and notwithstanding that they have come under considerable criticism for their concept-heavy, skills-light, knowledge-thin, constructivist slant, they're simply accepted as gospel by the authors of this report. You may not want to bother but you can find ordering instructions at www.nap.edu/catalog/10023.html.

Richard M. Ingersoll, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington
January 2002

The University of Washington's Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy published this 33-page research report by Richard M. Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania. Ingersoll has long been one of the most dogged and perceptive analysts of "out-of-field" teaching in the United States. Here he breaks some new ground, albeit in preliminary fashion. Using the federal government's Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), he looks not at issues of teacher training, certification or supply/demand but at other reasons why teachers end up responsible for courses in subjects different from those they trained for. It turns out that, especially for disadvantaged youngsters, much out-of-field teaching is explained by "aspects of the administration and organization of schools." Most striking: "[T]he way school administrators-especially school principals-respond to and cope with staffing decisions and challenges affects the levels of out-of-field teaching more than does the extent to which schools face teacher shortages and attendant hiring difficulties." It seems that schools and school systems differ considerably in how their administrators respond to difficulties in filling specific jobs. Ingersoll reports, for example, that only two-thirds of U.S. school districts "require that new teacher hires hold a college major or minor in the field to be taught." The implications are large: out-of-field teaching is not entirely (or even primarily) a product of demographic forces, large manpower shifts or the ups and downs of training institutions and certification rules. (Nor are unions to be blamed.) And the problem will not be solved, says Ingersoll, by "recruiting large numbers of new candidates into teaching and mandating more rigorous training requirements for them." His analysis implies that in schools, as in other institutions, getting the right people into the right jobs has much to do with the quality of leadership. The report may be downloaded at http://www.ctpweb.org.

Loretta Kelley and Cathy Ringstaff, WestEd
2002

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, businesses across the United States invested heavily in information communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers and networking systems but received few benefits in terms of increased productivity. It seemed a lot of workers simply used the new technologies to do pretty much what they had always done or, worse, used it to play games and randomly surf. Thus, their productivity remained flat. This combination of increased investment in ICTs and stagnant productivity even got a name-the Solow Paradox. By the mid-1990s, however, workers, often the younger ones within a firm, began using this technology to change the way they did their jobs. As a result, the U.S. economy boomed during the second half of the decade. The lesson for schools: it is not enough to invest in technology alone. To produce benefits, it must be allowed to change the way the organization and its employees operate. This is the conclusion of "The Learning Return on Our Education Technology Investment," a report by WestEd's Regional Technology in Education Consortium that reviews major research findings related to technology use in education. The authors do not claim to have discovered a scientific basis for the effective use of technology in education but argue that they have identified factors associated with effectiveness that repeatedly appear in the largest research studies of technology in education. To wit: 1) technology is best used as one component in a broad-based reform effort; 2) teachers must be adequately trained to use the technology; 3) teachers may need to change their beliefs about teaching and learning; 4) Resources must be sufficient and accessible; 5) effective technology use requires long-term planning and support; and 6) technology should be integrated into the curricular and instructional framework. In short, educational technologies are most effective when used to change how learning gets done. To read the report, surf to http://www.wested.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619.

Andrew Sum, Irwin Kirsch and Robert Taggart, Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service
February 2002

This interesting and disturbing 42-page analysis of adult literacy in the United States was published last month by Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center. The authors took two important multi-national studies of adult literacy that were conducted during the 1990's and reanalyzed their data, both to see how the U.S. fared overall and, more interestingly, how various sub-populations did. The results are generally sobering, and written in unusually strong language: "The U.S. spends more per capital on education than nearly all other high-income countries... [yet] our average proficiency scores at best only match the world average....Our educational system is clearly less productive in raising the literacy skills of students per dollar spent....[T]his inefficiency is a major drain on our economy. Further, our renewed national commitment to educational improvements over the past decade has thus far yielded only minor gains....[T]he U.S. appears to be living off its past higher educational investments and will inevitably lose ground in the coming decade." We learn that older adults are more literate than younger adults; that white adults are notably more literate than minorities; and that native-born Americans are significantly more literate than immigrants. The upshot, say the authors, is that big trouble lies ahead in terms of America's economic competitiveness as well as various gauges of domestic equality. Thus the report's provocative title. (The authors also offer policy recommendations, though these are less interesting.) Download a copy at http://www.ets.org/research/pic or order a hard copy for $15 by calling 609-734-5694 or e-mailing [email protected].

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Miguel Urquiola, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
January 2002

Here is another (#43) in the growing series of "occasional papers" from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Written by Chang-Tai Hsieh of Princeton and Miguel Urquiola of Cornell, this one analyzes what the authors call Chile's "school voucher program" dating back to 1981. They contend that Chile's experience lends itself to the analysis of the effects of vouchers because the country's policy has remained fairly stable, the number of children who shifted from public to private schools (at least in urban areas) was sizable, and there are good data regarding student achievement. The authors conclude that vouchers in Chile produced no overall improvement in that country's overall educational achievement due to what they call "sorting": the reallocation of stronger and relatively wealthier students from public to private schools. The technical analysis in this paper is intricate and worthy of close inspection by more sophisticated methodologists than I. It would also be valuable to obtain some Chilean perspectives on what happened there and how best to analyze it. It seems fairly clear, though, that the data from Chile warrant attention by school choice researchers, even as one wonders how much the cultural, sociological and political singularities of a country shape its individual and institutional behaviors in ways that would not translate to another country even under seemingly similar policy circumstances. To view the paper, surf to http://www.ncspe.org or order a hard copy at (212) 678-3259 or [email protected].

Before a packed house earlier this week, the Ohio board of education hosted a two-hour panel discussion on the teaching of evolution and how it should be handled within the state's new science standards. Representatives of the "intelligent design" movement, who believe that life is so complex that some sort of intelligent designer must be involved, and thus that that natural selection is not the sole force behind evolution, argued that their views should be included in classroom discussions of evolution. In response, scientists from two major universities argued that the theory of evolution has grown in strength through decades of repeated experimentation and discovery, while intelligent design theory has not been tested. There is no real controversy among scientists over evolution, they argued, and science's practice of endlessly testing evidence means that not all ideas deserve equal treatment in the classroom. The debate was prompted by a new set of science standards to be voted on by the state school board this year, standards that are opposed by creationists of various stripes. Ohio's old science standards received a grade of F from Professor Lawrence Lerner, who evaluated the treatment of evolution in the science standards of all 50 states in a September 2000 report for the Fordham Foundation. Unlike the old standards, which skirted any mention of evolution, Ohio's new (draft) science standards treat this topic in exemplary fashion. Lerner says they would earn a grade of A.

"Ohio Board Hears Debate on Alternative to Darwinism," by Francis X. Clines, The New York Times, March 12, 2002

"Ohio's New Standards Earn an A from National Science Standards Expert," National Center for Science Education, March 11, 2002, and "Ohio on the Brink: Will Creationists Ruin Science Education in the Buckeye State?" by Lawrence S. Lerner, March 11, 2002

"Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States," by Lawrence S. Lerner, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, September 2000

Secretary Rod Paige has just released a five-year strategic plan for the U.S. Department of Education that seeks to bring real accountability to the Department's own functions. Combining elements of the No Child Left Behind Act with the President's management agenda, the plan sets six strategic goals for the agency, each with specific objectives and performance measures. The goals are to: 1) create a culture of achievement, 2) improve student achievement, 3) develop safe schools and strong character, 4) transform education into an evidence-based field, 5) enhance the quality of and access to postsecondary and adult education, and 6) establish management excellence. The Department intends to report to Congress annually on actions linked to the goals and to appraise employees based on performance linked to the goals. To view the plan, surf to www.ed.gov/pubs/stratplan2002-07/index.html.

Yesterday, a House education subcommittee "marked up" H.R. 3801, which was recently introduced by subcommittee chairman Michael Castle (R-Delaware), committee chairman John Boehner (R-Ohio) and several other GOP congressmen. The full committee is slated to tackle it next week.

The official synopsis terms it "a bill to provide for improvement of Federal education research, statistics, evaluation, information, and dissemination...." But don't yawn too fast. What H.R. 3801 actually does is radically restructure the federal government's arrangements for education R & D, statistics, program evaluation and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For the most part, it seems likely to improve the current set-up. But it introduces a couple of risks. And the current version would do serious harm to NAEP.

The present Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) would vanish. From its ashes would arise a new entity called the Academy of Education Sciences, presided over by a director to be nominated by the President (and confirmed by the Senate) for a six-year term. (Incumbent OERI assistant secretary Russ Whitehurst is grandfathered into that post until July 1, 2007.) The new Academy will have its own policy-setting National Board for Education Sciences, also presidential appointees, fifteen in number (plus ex officios), dominated by "highly qualified experts." Though nominally inside the Education Department, the Academy director would enjoy complete autonomy over the programs and activities in his purview. ("The Secretary shall delegate to the Director all functions for carrying out this title.")

The Academy would contain three "national education centers," one each for research, statistics and evaluation, each with a "commissioner" chosen by the Academy director (and vulnerable to being dismissed at will by the director). There would also be a new (and somewhat ominously named) "Knowledge Utilization Office."

In appraising H.R. 3801, keep in mind how often federal education R & D has been restructured-and how little good has been done by those reorganizations, whether spearheaded by the executive branch or by Congress. The problems of federal education research run deep. They begin, but do not end, with the fact that many observers, including lots of researchers, doubt that "education sciences" is a term with much meaning outside a few well-studied areas such as primary reading. So don't expect too much from another reshuffling of the deck chairs on this leaky vessel. Lawmakers can (as they plainly here hope to do) give it the look of the National Institutes of Health-and mandate that everything done by the Academy be based on "scientific validity"-without thereby making education research any more scientific than it's ever been.

That said, H.R. 3801 works two worthy innovations by reshuffling a pair of misplaced programs. First, it shifts responsibility for evaluating federal programs from the Secretary's aegis to the new Academy. This is apt to make for more honest, less political appraisals of Education Department programs-including the kind of evaluations that may run counter to the policy predilections of whatever administration is then in office. There is a science of program evaluation but it's seldom been applied to federal activities in education.

Second, it takes the care and feeding of the infamous "regional labs" out of the research unit and turns them over to the Secretary. Such baldly political creatures should be dealt with by political types, not academics-precisely the opposite of program evaluation. (For those who slumbered these past 37 years, the "labs" were created in LBJ's day to handle research dissemination and technical assistance, back when there was no Internet and few state education departments had this capacity. In the decades since, they've been aggressively successful feeders at the federal pork barrel but they do little good, even as they consume most of the research budget.) Title II of the bill would create ten new "regional entities" responsible for "technical assistance" in education, each with its own board named by the governors of the region's states. Those entities would then dispense technical assistance dollars as they see fit which may, but need not, mean using the existing labs. Though the labs could also bid on Academy research projects, they (and the long-established university-based research centers) would be held to the same scientific standards as other contenders. It appears from the bill as if their automatic federal subsidy will cease-unless, of course, Congress recreates it via the appropriations process.

Problems with this bill? Two risks and then the NAEP mess.

One risk is inherent in making anybody as powerful as the new Academy director will be. If the right person wields this power imaginatively and prudently, good things could happen. But that person's blind spots, hang-ups and favorites will make an enormous difference. Though the new board could serve as a valuable counterweight, one never knows what sorts of people the White House-any White House-will choose for such a body. It could fall into the grip of "highly qualified experts" who would push (for example) a constructivist, anti-testing agenda (like the education "experts" at the National Academy of Sciences) or into the clutches of establishment interest groups. Nor will it be brought back to earth by the participation of governors, mayors, newspaper editors and admirals. It's one thing to assert that everything be "scientifically valid." It's another to vest all authority in experts.

The other risk is downgrading the National Center for Education Statistics, the oldest and, to my mind, most important function of the federal government in the field of education. NCES would retain no autonomy nor could its Commissioner defy the Academy director in the name of statistical integrity or accuracy. That's a hazardous move for any federal statistical agency, one that likely wouldn't fly at the Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The big problem: H.R. 3801 makes a confused mess of the constitutional arrangements for NAEP and its National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) and does so at a precarious time, considering that the recently enacted No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act made major changes that NAEP and NAGB have barely begun to assimilate.

Under NCLB, NAEP bears a heavy burden as the external "auditor" of state and national achievement in reading and math. The testing cycle is accelerated and all states are required to take part. NCLB also changed NAGB's composition and lobbed new threats at the security of NAEP tests and the validity of the NAEP sample. For the first time in its three-decade history, NAEP turned out to be a major political battleground. We'll be lucky if it emerges with its credibility intact.

The drafters of H.R. 3801 intended not to make any more changes in NAEP and NAGB, yet the bill makes big ones, while not solving any of the problems that antedate NCLB, such as confusion over where NAGB's jurisdiction ends and that of the executive branch begins. (In the notorious episode when then-Vice President Al Gore took over a NAEP press conference to spin some new assessment results in ways that he found politically advantageous, NAGB was powerless to prevent this abuse of NAEP's neutrality because it doesn't really control the release of NAEP results.) Another long-standing problem unsolved by H.R. 3801: NAGB members' terms are too short for newcomers to master the complexities of NAEP.

So the status quo isn't great. But H.R. 3801 makes one whopping change in it by placing NAEP and NAGB within the new Academy of Education Sciences, creating a brand-new jurisdictional tug of war between "independent" NAGB and the "independent" Academy director (and the new Education Sciences board).

NAGB, please understand, does not actually administer NAEP. It sets policy for NAEP but the program itself has been run by the National Center for Education Statistics, now to be submerged into the new Academy. This means, for example, that NAEP reports will be subject to the Academy's peer review processes, thus (at minimum) making assessment results even slower to emerge and harder to understand than today. It means the Academy director-and Education Sciences Board, with its very different composition from NAGB's-will control NAEP's budget and personnel as well as the multi-million dollar contracts to conduct the actual testing program. It means the authority to employ NAGB's own staff, currently delegated from the Education Secretary to NAGB, will now be entrusted to the Academy director as, apparently, will the appointment of NAGB's chairman. Myriad other "delegations" of authority that now flow from the Secretary to the governing board will instead flow to the Academy director.

This is a mistake. It's a mistake to disrupt NAEP's constitutional arrangements at such a vulnerable time. And it's a special mistake to subordinate NAEP to "experts" at a moment when the credibility of the "nation's report card" depends on confidence that its own governing board-bipartisan and carefully balanced among elected officials, top-notch educators, parents and the general public-is truly independent and truly in charge.

What do to? Ideally, NAGB and NAEP would be freed from both the Education Department and the Academy, placed in a separate entity responsible for nothing but national assessment. Such a bill emerged-with unanimous bipartisan support-from the same House subcommittee in the previous Congress. Today, we're told, that plan is "unacceptable" to conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, though nobody will say why or who. If they wield a veto, however, the second best approach is to put NAGB in clear charge of NAEP and move both out of the new Academy while leaving them in the Department of Education. Considering the new responsibilities that Congress recently placed upon NAEP, it would be smart to put this vital testing program in a place that thinks it's important-as Secretary Paige plainly does-rather than in a new, unproven, expert-driven Academy whose views on testing are unknown and that, in any case, is going to have plenty else on its plate.

A press release describing the new legislation can be found at http://edworkforce.house.gov/press/press107/oeriintro22702.htm

To read more about the problems of federal education research and the challenges of improving OERI, see "Fixing Federal Research," by Maris Vinovskis, Education Next, Winter 2001.

Philanthropist Eli Broad has engaged Michigan Governor John Engler and Detroit Public Schools CEO Kenneth Burnley in an effort to recruit and train dynamic leaders from business, the military, and other backgrounds to run urban school districts. Three dozen executives and educators are enrolled in the Broad Center for Superintendents' first class of aspiring school system executives. There they will receive training in leadership, student learning and teaching strategies, education decision-making, local politics, public relations, marketing and school competition, according to an article in The Detroit News. While some in the education establishment voice doubt about recruiting school leaders from business ranks, the Broad Center's managing director says that underperforming school districts need to move beyond "the protectors of the past" and hire superintendents "with the stamina and capacity to lead." For details see "Leaders tout state's method for nation's public schools," by John Bebow, The Detroit News, March 7, 2002.

Andrew Sum, Irwin Kirsch and Robert Taggart, Policy Information Center, Educational Testing Service
February 2002

This interesting and disturbing 42-page analysis of adult literacy in the United States was published last month by Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center. The authors took two important multi-national studies of adult literacy that were conducted during the 1990's and reanalyzed their data, both to see how the U.S. fared overall and, more interestingly, how various sub-populations did. The results are generally sobering, and written in unusually strong language: "The U.S. spends more per capital on education than nearly all other high-income countries... [yet] our average proficiency scores at best only match the world average....Our educational system is clearly less productive in raising the literacy skills of students per dollar spent....[T]his inefficiency is a major drain on our economy. Further, our renewed national commitment to educational improvements over the past decade has thus far yielded only minor gains....[T]he U.S. appears to be living off its past higher educational investments and will inevitably lose ground in the coming decade." We learn that older adults are more literate than younger adults; that white adults are notably more literate than minorities; and that native-born Americans are significantly more literate than immigrants. The upshot, say the authors, is that big trouble lies ahead in terms of America's economic competitiveness as well as various gauges of domestic equality. Thus the report's provocative title. (The authors also offer policy recommendations, though these are less interesting.) Download a copy at http://www.ets.org/research/pic or order a hard copy for $15 by calling 609-734-5694 or e-mailing [email protected].

Chang-Tai Hsieh and Miguel Urquiola, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
January 2002

Here is another (#43) in the growing series of "occasional papers" from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Written by Chang-Tai Hsieh of Princeton and Miguel Urquiola of Cornell, this one analyzes what the authors call Chile's "school voucher program" dating back to 1981. They contend that Chile's experience lends itself to the analysis of the effects of vouchers because the country's policy has remained fairly stable, the number of children who shifted from public to private schools (at least in urban areas) was sizable, and there are good data regarding student achievement. The authors conclude that vouchers in Chile produced no overall improvement in that country's overall educational achievement due to what they call "sorting": the reallocation of stronger and relatively wealthier students from public to private schools. The technical analysis in this paper is intricate and worthy of close inspection by more sophisticated methodologists than I. It would also be valuable to obtain some Chilean perspectives on what happened there and how best to analyze it. It seems fairly clear, though, that the data from Chile warrant attention by school choice researchers, even as one wonders how much the cultural, sociological and political singularities of a country shape its individual and institutional behaviors in ways that would not translate to another country even under seemingly similar policy circumstances. To view the paper, surf to http://www.ncspe.org or order a hard copy at (212) 678-3259 or [email protected].

Edited by Iris Weiss, Michael Knapp, Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill, National Research Council
2001

Here we have yet another National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council report on education, this one paid for by the National Science Foundation and edited by two academics who served on the committee that did the study (Iris Weiss and Michael Knapp) and two National Academy staffers (Karen Hollweg and Gail Burrill). It starts with the so-called "national standards" in math, science and technology, all of them developed and issued by self-governing and sometimes self-interested private groups (the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Research Council itself, and a less familiar outfit called the International Technology Education Association.) The basic question addressed here is how to determine what difference those standards have made in the U.S. education system and what effects they've had on student learning. Yet that question stays unanswered. This volume simply builds an elaborate "framework" within which others can seek to answer it and by which people can interpret studies claiming to answer it. This makes for an unsatisfying document, more a guide to "how to look at this question" than an actual look. Meager as it is, there's still a problem with this approach, which resembles members of a track team devising the criteria by which their own performance will be judged in the high jump and relay race. There's much overlap between the developers of the standards being discussed and the authors and overseers of this report, which helps explain the loving stance that it takes toward the standards. In the case of the NCTM math standards, for example, we observe that Gail Burrill, one of the editors of this report, is a former NCTM president. The science standards discussed in this NAS/NRC publication were themselves developed and promulgated by the NAS/NRC. And the Academy extensively reviewed the technology standards before they were released. So there's something deeply self-referential here. There's also something reverential about it. Despite the fact that these are privately developed, voluntary standards, and notwithstanding that they have come under considerable criticism for their concept-heavy, skills-light, knowledge-thin, constructivist slant, they're simply accepted as gospel by the authors of this report. You may not want to bother but you can find ordering instructions at www.nap.edu/catalog/10023.html.

Edited by Joy A. Palmer
2001

"I'll tell you that one of my favorite fancies is to look at my family as a small world, to watch the progress of my little men, and, lately, to see how well the influence of my little women works upon them." The novelist and educator Louisa May Alcott shared this particular insight into the workings of human nature, but it is representative of the sort of things we all know but can't articulate as well as a writer like Alcott. Fifty Major Thinkers on Education is the first of two volumes of essays describing the impact of some of history's more profound thinkers on education and human nature. It's nicely varied. For those who advocate a rigorous academic education, there's the German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart who postulated a theory of education in the early 19th century that should be, "profound, precise and complete,' and the teaching of which must demand 'high standards' and 'rigorous thinking." For child-centered progressives, there is Herbert Spencer arguing that "Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible." Those who favor service learning as a way to merge academics with life will recognize the voice of John Dewey. Today, as public officials and educators across the country talk about the opportunities afforded in the first five years of life, it is interesting to learn about the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel. In 1840, he was struggling to come up with a term to describe his school for young children when one day during a walk he exclaimed to a colleague, "Eureka! Kindergarten shall the institute be called!" This book will benefit people who want to understand the roots of today's education thinking. It recalls Thomas Huxley's comment about Herbert Spencer: "He was the most original of thinkers though he never invented a new thought." Fifty Major Thinkers on Education makes it clear that those of us who work in the world of education in the 21st century can only hope to add clarity and new variations to insights long ago uncovered. The ISBN is 0-415-23126-4; the publisher is Routledge. To order, call 212-216-7800 or visit http://www.routledge.com.

Loretta Kelley and Cathy Ringstaff, WestEd
2002

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, businesses across the United States invested heavily in information communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers and networking systems but received few benefits in terms of increased productivity. It seemed a lot of workers simply used the new technologies to do pretty much what they had always done or, worse, used it to play games and randomly surf. Thus, their productivity remained flat. This combination of increased investment in ICTs and stagnant productivity even got a name-the Solow Paradox. By the mid-1990s, however, workers, often the younger ones within a firm, began using this technology to change the way they did their jobs. As a result, the U.S. economy boomed during the second half of the decade. The lesson for schools: it is not enough to invest in technology alone. To produce benefits, it must be allowed to change the way the organization and its employees operate. This is the conclusion of "The Learning Return on Our Education Technology Investment," a report by WestEd's Regional Technology in Education Consortium that reviews major research findings related to technology use in education. The authors do not claim to have discovered a scientific basis for the effective use of technology in education but argue that they have identified factors associated with effectiveness that repeatedly appear in the largest research studies of technology in education. To wit: 1) technology is best used as one component in a broad-based reform effort; 2) teachers must be adequately trained to use the technology; 3) teachers may need to change their beliefs about teaching and learning; 4) Resources must be sufficient and accessible; 5) effective technology use requires long-term planning and support; and 6) technology should be integrated into the curricular and instructional framework. In short, educational technologies are most effective when used to change how learning gets done. To read the report, surf to http://www.wested.org/cs/wew/view/rs/619.

Richard M. Ingersoll, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, University of Washington
January 2002

The University of Washington's Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy published this 33-page research report by Richard M. Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania. Ingersoll has long been one of the most dogged and perceptive analysts of "out-of-field" teaching in the United States. Here he breaks some new ground, albeit in preliminary fashion. Using the federal government's Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), he looks not at issues of teacher training, certification or supply/demand but at other reasons why teachers end up responsible for courses in subjects different from those they trained for. It turns out that, especially for disadvantaged youngsters, much out-of-field teaching is explained by "aspects of the administration and organization of schools." Most striking: "[T]he way school administrators-especially school principals-respond to and cope with staffing decisions and challenges affects the levels of out-of-field teaching more than does the extent to which schools face teacher shortages and attendant hiring difficulties." It seems that schools and school systems differ considerably in how their administrators respond to difficulties in filling specific jobs. Ingersoll reports, for example, that only two-thirds of U.S. school districts "require that new teacher hires hold a college major or minor in the field to be taught." The implications are large: out-of-field teaching is not entirely (or even primarily) a product of demographic forces, large manpower shifts or the ups and downs of training institutions and certification rules. (Nor are unions to be blamed.) And the problem will not be solved, says Ingersoll, by "recruiting large numbers of new candidates into teaching and mandating more rigorous training requirements for them." His analysis implies that in schools, as in other institutions, getting the right people into the right jobs has much to do with the quality of leadership. The report may be downloaded at http://www.ctpweb.org.