The Education Gadfly Weekly

A Time for Change: The 42nd Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan International, September 2010)

This latest edition of the PDK/Gallup annual public opinion survey on American schools proves more intriguing than past installments (perhaps because they’ve added a creative thinker or two to the advisory board). In fact, many of the questions are particularly relevant to current education reform. For example, most folks believe that major education decisions should be made on the state level, including setting standards, deciding curriculum, and holding students accountable, as opposed to on the local or federal ones; but they also believe the state should be paying the lion’s share of education costs. On a more granular level, 54 percent believe the best way to deal with a poorly performing school is to flood it with outside support, as opposed to taking more drastic measures like closing it, and 68 percent are in favor of charter schools (up from just 42 percent ten years ago). Sixty percent even favor a “large increase” in the number of charters. Merit pay gets widespread support, too. Seventy-one percent believe that teachers should be paid according to their work quality, not by a standard pay scale, which trumps experience and graduate degrees. And most believe that teacher quality should be education’s top priority. But everyone’s favorite finding has remained the same (now for a quarter century): Americans tend to confer on their own local public schools as much better grade (A or B) than on schools “across the nation as a whole” (which still get a C).

Wolfram Schulz, John Ainley, Julian Fraillon, David Kerr, and Bruno Losito, Initial Findings from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2010)

This rather dense study gives a broad look at student knowledge and understanding of civics and citizenship in thirty-eight countries. Though it unfortunately omits the U.S., it still provides a wealth of information about changes in knowledge of civics since 1999 (using a previous IEA study), engagement in public life, student perceptions of threats to civil society, schools’ and education systems’ impact on attitudes towards citizenship, and how students’ backgrounds relate to their knowledge of civic and citizenship education. Most notable is the degree of variation from country to country and, even more interestingly, within them. For example, female students, students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and students whose parents are interested in political and social issues tended to have more civic knowledge. Depressing, though unsurprising, is that student civic knowledge has declined in the last decade. What to do about this, however, is far from clear. Indeed, the study’s overview of how schools and communities foster civic knowledge raises more questions than provides answers.

No Gold Stars for successful L.A. teachers, by Jason Felch, The Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2010

 There’s no question that schools need to do a better job separating the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to teacher quality. And not just so that they can rid themselves of the weakest links; shining a light on high-quality instruction is crucial, too. So asserts the L.A. Times in the latest installment in its controversial series on teacher effectiveness. Everybody and their mothers have already weighed in on the newspaper’s decision to publish the names of effective (and ineffective) teachers, and the merits and drawbacks of the paper’s particular approach to value-added measurement. (We tend to be queasy about the public release of these data-by-name, though it’s surely within a newspaper’s legitimate purview, like publishing politicians’ voting records or restaurants’ results on sanitation inspections. As for the issues with value-added analysis, we say: let not the perfect be the enemy of the good.) But what’s most striking about the Times’s latest salvo is its portrayal of an education culture in LaLa land that is uninterested in celebrating its high-achieving, butt-kicking superstars. “No one is ever really singled out, neither good nor bad,” Aldo Pinto, a hyper-effective teacher, told the Times. “The culture of the union is: Everyone is the same. You can't single out anyone for doing badly. So as a result, we don't point out the good either. When I worked at a bank, I was employee of the month. For LAUSD, for some reason, it’s not a good thing to do.” If we want to get serious about retaining high-performing teachers in our schools, we had best listen to the likes of Mr. Pinto—and recognize their incredible work.

Future of N.J. school reform remains uncertain without federal funds, permanent education chief, by Chris Megerian and Jessica Calefati, Star Ledger, August 29, 2010

Did you spend last week at the Vineyard, or in a cave? If so, you might have missed the excitement in the Garden State. The Star-Ledger summed it up nicely: “The week started with controversy over a botched answer in the state’s 1,000-page application for Race to the Top funding. It ended with Gov. Chris Christie’s messy firing of Education Commissioner Bret Schundler.” The state is forging ahead, however—a spokesman for the governor said education reform efforts will continue despite the setbacks. Rochelle Hendricks, a longtime state education official, will serve as acting commissioner while the governor’s office searches for a permanent replacement. Andy Smarick—our very own Fordham Institute alum—is the new deputy commissioner there, and, according to the Star-Ledger, two sources close to the administration said the governor hopes to install him as Schundler’s permanent replacement. It may come as no surprise that Gadfly (and all the Fordham team) heartily supports this excellent plan. In Smarick, Christie has one of the best imaginable candidates for this post—indeed, one of the nation’s brightest education policy stars—already sitting just a few buildings away. And you don’t have to take our word for it; Education Sector’s Kevin Carey told the Star-Ledger, “Andy is not a bomb-thrower, not an ideologue, not someone who wants to tear down public education. He’s hard-working and sincerely focused on improving education for New Jersey’s children.” We couldn’t agree more!

A Time for Change: The 42nd Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappan International, September 2010)

This latest edition of the PDK/Gallup annual public opinion survey on American schools proves more intriguing than past installments (perhaps because they’ve added a creative thinker or two to the advisory board). In fact, many of the questions are particularly relevant to current education reform. For example, most folks believe that major education decisions should be made on the state level, including setting standards, deciding curriculum, and holding students accountable, as opposed to on the local or federal ones; but they also believe the state should be paying the lion’s share of education costs. On a more granular level, 54 percent believe the best way to deal with a poorly performing school is to flood it with outside support, as opposed to taking more drastic measures like closing it, and 68 percent are in favor of charter schools (up from just 42 percent ten years ago). Sixty percent even favor a “large increase” in the number of charters. Merit pay gets widespread support, too. Seventy-one percent believe that teachers should be paid according to their work quality, not by a standard pay scale, which trumps experience and graduate degrees. And most believe that teacher quality should be education’s top priority. But everyone’s favorite finding has remained the same (now for a quarter century): Americans tend to confer on their own local public schools as much better grade (A or B) than on schools “across the nation as a whole” (which still get a C).

Wolfram Schulz, John Ainley, Julian Fraillon, David Kerr, and Bruno Losito, Initial Findings from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2010)

This rather dense study gives a broad look at student knowledge and understanding of civics and citizenship in thirty-eight countries. Though it unfortunately omits the U.S., it still provides a wealth of information about changes in knowledge of civics since 1999 (using a previous IEA study), engagement in public life, student perceptions of threats to civil society, schools’ and education systems’ impact on attitudes towards citizenship, and how students’ backgrounds relate to their knowledge of civic and citizenship education. Most notable is the degree of variation from country to country and, even more interestingly, within them. For example, female students, students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and students whose parents are interested in political and social issues tended to have more civic knowledge. Depressing, though unsurprising, is that student civic knowledge has declined in the last decade. What to do about this, however, is far from clear. Indeed, the study’s overview of how schools and communities foster civic knowledge raises more questions than provides answers.