The Education Gadfly Weekly

Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh
National Council on Teacher Quality
June 2008

The National Council on Teacher Quality evaluated the syllabi and course requirements of elementary math teacher preparation programs across the country and found such programs to be woefully inadequate and to have wildly different ideas about how to produce effective elementary math teachers. The usual scapegoat for the poor math prowess of some elementary students--the comparatively low quantitative ability of their teachers (as evidenced by those teachers' low math SAT scores)--turns out to be just part of the problem. NCTQ found only ten of the seventy-seven elementary math education programs that it examined in forty-nine states to have adequate content and methodology course requirements and only one program (at the University of Georgia) earned truly high marks from the reviewers. Without any standardization of what elementary math teachers need to know, these programs are scattered in both content and methods. Many programs never get around to requiring future elementary teachers to study the content of elementary-school math (though other kinds of math may be on tap). And some have no math-methods courses at all. There's plenty more in this comprehensive report, which you can find here.

Janet S. Hansen
Committee for Economic Development
May 2008

This multi-faceted look at teacher pensions describes the most widely used current plans, their likely sustainability, which teachers benefit from them the most, and options for their redesign. It echoes many findings from our Ohio-specific report on the same topic by economists Michael Podgursky and Bob Costrell, and from the same authors' recent Education Next piece on this subject. Hansen, too, finds that defined benefit (DB) plans (in which retirement payouts are calculated primarily through years of service and final salary) ill-serve many of the educators covered by them--and these are the plans that cover most public-school teachers. Those who fare well under such plans must work for a very long time in the same state or district, while those who exit the profession early or take a teaching job elsewhere suffer acute pension penalties. She contends that the usual alternative to DB plans, namely defined contribution (DC) plans, which are widespread in the private sector, aren't the best answer for teaching. They carry their own issues; the major one is that plan participants, as opposed to sponsors, bear the most risk. Hansen recommends a hybrid called a "cash balance" plan, which she says offers the best of both the DB and DC approaches. It's no secret that teacher pension systems are out of sync with current labor markets and career patterns--and unsustainably expensive, too. This easy-to-digest report helps to explain why.

Even if education isn't at the top of the list for Senators Obama or McCain during this election season, it remains a major concern for governors and CEOs. That's because they see a direct link between educational achievement and economic growth. And this spring, Education Next published research by Hoover Institution scholar Eric Hanushek and colleagues that illustrated this link. The analysts found that, in general, the higher a country scored on international tests of math and science, the faster its economy grew from 1960 to 2000.

Of course, there was one whopping exception: our very own U.S. of A. Hanushek et al write, "The United States has never done well on international assessments of student achievement. Instead, its level of cognitive skills is only about average among the developed countries. Yet the country's GDP growth rate has been higher than average over the past century. If cognitive skills are so important to economic growth, how can we explain the puzzling case of the U.S.?"

They answer their own question by pointing to factors in the larger economy: our relatively free labor markets, minimal regulation of industry, lower tax rates, etc. They also suspect that our historical lead in achieving universal public education, and our excellent system of higher education, might deserve some of the credit.

But there's one obvious entity they don't mention: today's K-12 schools. Isn't it possible that the American primary-secondary education system might be doing something right? While it's lousy at producing academic achievement, as measured by math and science tests, perhaps it's great at producing individuals with the skills, attitudes, and habits that drive the economy toward higher levels of growth.

That seems to be why so many countries send teams of educators to the U.S. to study our education system: they want to know how to produce the next Bill Gates or Sergey Brin, the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. But here's where most such visitors err: they tend to look inside our classrooms. They might be wiser to look at what's happening outside of them, for it might be our extra-curricular activities that represent the true genius of today's American education system, at least when it comes to fostering creativity, leadership, and the other "21st Century skills" that employers crave.

That's right: our athletic programs, student councils, debate clubs, school newspapers, orchestras, theater troupes, FFAs, and the rest of the panoply of after-school activities might be boosting America's economic output. While Asian kids are cramming at "exam cram schools" and European youngsters are smoking Gitanes in sidewalk cafés, our students are engaged in activities that give them the confidence to achieve in myriad ways--a taste of achievement they then carry into the world of work.

No, I can't prove it; our able research assistant searched and searched and couldn't find any studies examining this potential link. And not everybody buys it, not even among my Fordham colleagues. (See, for example, Checker Finn's piece below.) But the literature is full of evidence that students who participate in extra-curriculars tend to have stronger "social self-concept," more "cultural capital," loftier educational aspirations, diminished absenteeism, and greater college attendance. This is no secret; it's why elite colleges want to see extra-curricular activities on applicants' resumes--fueling an extra-curricular arms race in some elite high schools. (The research also indicates diminishing returns once students overload on activities, so a good rule is "everything in moderation.")

Absent conclusive research proof, let's rely on a little common sense. Try this thought experiment yourself. Think of the skills you use on a daily basis in your job. These may include setting goals and working toward them, collaborating with colleagues, speaking publicly, organizing your time effectively, designing and leading projects and project teams, listening to the concerns of others, competing against other organizations, and juggling multiple duties. Now ponder: back in high school, did you get to practice these skills more often during class time or during extra-curricular activities? I strongly suspect it was the latter.

That's not to say that the formal curriculum holds no value. Of course it does. If your job requires you to write well, thank your English teacher. And of course our schools aim to do more than produce economic powerhouses; we study history and civics because we want to enrich our democracy, not because it will help us out-compete the EU and the Asian tigers.

But it does suggest that our culture of extra-curricular activities--a culture that transcends schools (think Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, church youth groups, etc.)--might be a precious resource deserving of support. Yet this particular resource is increasingly under attack from several directions.

First, in times of budget crunch, school boards are tempted to consider extra-curriculars as, well, extras, frills even. Such activities are often the first to go. And with the baby-boomers about to retire and put a huge squeeze on public resources, and with the proportion of American households with school-age children down to 25 percent, any rational forecaster would say that tougher financial times are ahead for our schools, at least in the long term. That could spell disaster for extra-curriculars.

But they are also under attack from some reformers. Consider the "small schools" movement, which might have its virtues but which results in tiny schools that can't support many, if any, extra-curriculars. (Granted, some find ways to make it work, like the KIPP charter school in the Bronx that boasts a world-class orchestra program in which every pupil participates.) Or contemplate the "dual enrollment" movement, which encourages high school kids to spend time on college campuses. Again, there are good reasons to support this, but it likely draws teenagers away from sports, theater, orchestra, etc. We should consider whether the trade-offs are worth it.

Perhaps the greatest threat comes from online learning. Clay Christensen predicts that half of all high school courses will soon be taken virtually. He's probably right, because it's much more efficient and less frustrating to impart knowledge individually to students via the Web than via a traditional classroom. But what if more and more teenagers stay home all day and learn via computer, and skip the sports and clubs and all the rest? Academic achievement might go up while the proportion of students with "people skills" goes down. (Here's a suggestion: architects designing high schools of the future should skip the classrooms but keep the gym, the auditorium, and other common spaces. In other words, forget the "school" and build a "community center" instead. Kids could learn academics at home and come to the center for all the rest.)

So the next time that foreigners come to investigate what accounts for America's economic success, don't show them the extra-curriculars. They're our secret weapons; we might want to keep it that way!

A quarter century after A Nation at Risk, a growing number of America's education leaders appear to be abandoning hope for schools that significantly boost student achievement and are instead coming to view schools as multi-service community centers that do everything but teach. Which circumnavigates the vexing fact that bona fide achievement gains have proven difficult to bring about--and that a lot of educators don't want to be held to account for their pupils learning more.

The timing of this shift of focus couldn't be worse, however, as more states are beginning to report stronger test scores, at least in math and reading, thanks in no small part to the past two decades' fixation on standards, assessments, and accountability (see here and here). Meanwhile, America's standing on international comparisons continues to sag and employers despair over their inability to find adequately skilled and knowledgeable workers for our faltering economy.

Yet read closely the inaugural address of Randi Weingarten as president of the American Federation of Teachers, in which she promises to obliterate NCLB and the culture of testing (all the while professing allegiance to "standards" that have no meaning or traction if performance in relation to them isn't measured). Instead, she seeks a massive new program of federal aid to "community schools...that serve the neediest children by bringing together under one roof all the services and activities they and their families need." (Dental care, legal assistance, you name it, just about everything except high-level teaching and learning of important skills and content. She actually sounds a wee bit like my colleague Mike Petrilli! See his commentary above.)

Weingarten's speech echoed the recent manifesto of the "broader, bolder" crowd, which downplays "basic academic skills and cognitive growth" and "learning that occurs in formal school settings during the years from kindergarten through high school" and instead urges reorienting U.S. education policy toward "high-quality early childhood and pre-school programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that develop parents' capacity to support their children's education...[as well as] working relationships between schools and surrounding community institutions...[and] development of the whole person, including physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills."

Signers of that one include such luminaries as Tom Payzant, James Comer, Rudy Crew, Linda Darling-Hammond, Arne Duncan, John Goodlad, Arthur Levine, Richard Rothstein, Marshall Smith, Ted Sizer, and our own Diane Ravitch.

Nor is this impulse confined to educators. Even the U.S. Congress is showing similar proclivities of late. While making no discernible progress on renewing and repairing NCLB, the House Education and Labor Committee has been churning out new federal programs that seem to address everything except kids actually learning the 3 Rs, let alone literature, history, art, civics, and science. Recent committee initiatives bear on pre-school, "early childhood home visits," field trips to nature reserves (dubbed the "No Child Left Inside" act), school building modernization, and much more. It's unknowable today whether these measures will make it through the legislative meat grinder to the president's desk, much less get funded via the appropriations process. What's significant is that this is how the education committee is now spending its time.

Historically, American K-12 education has cycled between a focus on "academic excellence" and broader, more diffuse, "whole child" sorts of concerns. There are signs that such a shift is happening now. And it's a darn shame. Yesterday's push for achievement hasn't yet produced the learning gains we need. But it may be starting to do so. The surest way to curb tomorrow's gains is to change the policy focus and ease the pressure. As for the AFT's future direction, all I can say is that President Weingarten's early signals do no credit to Al Shanker's legacy.

A lot of people, and not just Republicans, have been waiting for John McCain to unveil his thinking about education policy. While Barack Obama has made multiple speeches on the subject (most recently to both teacher union conferences) and has elaborate position papers on his campaign website, the Arizona senator said little, except for tantalizing bits about his own education. Last month, however, McCain advisor Lisa Graham Keegan predicted that he would soon address this issue. She was right. Yesterday in Cincinnati, at the same NAACP convention that Senator Obama addressed on Monday, McCain framed an ambitious and fairly comprehensive array of education reforms and asked civil rights leaders to join him in pressing for them. Later in the day, his campaign website posted a reasonably detailed K-12 education plan. Speech and plan include some familiar GOP refrains (school choice, especially) but also move in such interesting directions as virtual education; giving budgetary authority to school principals; alternative certification for teachers; and several forms of differential pay, including more money for teachers who work in "troubled schools." It begins to look possible that education will turn into a bona fide election issue after all--and that differences between the presidential candidates in this sphere will actually prove interesting and salient. (McCain's speech is here; his plan is here.)

"McCain to NAACP: More education options," Associated Press, July 16, 2008

"Choice and Teacher Quality Top McCain's Education Agenda," by Alyson Klein, Education Week, July 16, 2008

One cheer for Maryland. It posted big gains on its state tests this year. According to the Washington Post, "the share of students statewide who were judged proficient or better rose six percentage points in reading and four points in math, to 82 percent and 76 percent, respectively." Baltimore, for example, saw historic rises--reading scores are up an average of 11 points and math scores up an average of 8 points. State superintendent Nancy Grasmick attributes these gains to a culture of "laserlike analysis" of academic achievement in the public schools of the Old Line State. Maybe. But we'd feel more comfortable if Maryland were also posting gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which it hasn't. In fact, Maryland's NAEP scores haven't risen in a decade. Why the disparity? Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller says that Maryland's state test, "sets the bar defining proficiency very close to the ground" (we indicated as much in our report, The Proficiency Illusion), and who knows for sure if that bar is moving? It is definitely pleasing to see that the biggest test score jumps occurred in districts, like Baltimore, that enroll many low-income and minority students, and pleasing as well to see the gains continuing through the treacherous middle-school years. But we're unconvinced that Maryland deserves all the praise (see here and here) currently being heaped upon it. (There's a political wrinkle, too. Grasmick and Governor Martin O'Malley haven't been getting on very well--and this week he finally succeeded in placing a majority of his appointees on the State Board of Education that employs her. See here.)

"Md. Scores In Reading, Math Show Big Strides," by Daniel de Vise and Nelson Hernandez, Washington Post, July 15, 2008

"City schools post big gains," by Sara Neufeld, Baltimore Sun, July 15, 2007

The latest study out of the Manhattan Institute makes a mountain out of the proverbial molehill. While the report contributes importantly to a largely neglected area of research, it also overextends its findings. What's more, the suggestion of co-author Jay Greene that its discoveries provide evidence regarding the narrowing of the curriculum is somewhat disingenuous.

The study reports that particular fifth-grade students--those who were enrolled in Florida elementary schools that received in 2001-2002 an "F" from the state's accountability program--made test score gains in reading and math as well as in science the following year. (A similar pattern for science was noted in the comparison schools.) This is worth knowing--part of the accumulating evidence that "accountability works" to boost student achievement. But it's important to be precise about what this study does and doesn't show.

First, the methodological concerns: We start with the report's title, Building on the Basics: The Impact of High-Stakes Testing on Student Proficiency in Low-Stakes Subjects. Sounds nice, but this is not actually an impact study; it's a simple correlation study and can therefore make no causal claims. Moreover, its design does not acknowledge that data are "nested" within classrooms, schools, and districts, an altogether different problem about which another whole article could be penned.

And because the researchers had only one year of science data (the state science test was first administered in 2002-2003), they had to develop a proxy baseline score in order to measure science achievement gains before and after the sanction occurred. Therefore, the study substitutes math and reading scores for science scores, assuming that if the students had taken the science test before 2002-2003, their scores would have been similar to those the pupils received on tests in other subjects. This is a reasonable surmise; student proficiency in science does have a reciprocal relationship with proficiency in math and reading. Still, proxies are proxies, and the results may have looked different with real baseline science data.

Even if we give the researchers a pass on some of these methodological missteps, the study itself is restricted in scope (another of its authors agrees). Let's not forget: it examined just one state, in one year, in one grade. The results really aren't that surprising. Matter of fact, an interim spillover scenario is easy to imagine: In 2001-2002, Florida doles out scarlet letter Fs, designed to embarrass low-performing schools and catalyze remedial action across the board; the very next year, Greene et al., observe data in multiple subjects and, lo and behold, they detect gains.

Put succinctly, this study does not prove that the school curriculum isn't narrowing in the aftermath of reading- and math-focused accountability regimens, and it's misleading to suggest that it does (see here).

Reliable survey data show that time spent teaching subjects other than reading and math in the past few years has decreased overall (see here, here, here ). And the Manhattan Institute study's contention that science is a "low-stakes" subject in Florida is not entirely true, either. If a state test is administered in a subject, regardless of whether it counts toward the school grade, that subject cannot be described as low-stakes, not from a teacher's standpoint. (Martin West, for example, found that schools in states that simply test in science spend roughly 26 percent more time a week on teaching science than do their non-testing state peers. Remember the educator truism that what is tested is what gets taught.) Keep in mind that Florida tested science for the first time in the very year that this study is based on. Can a reasonable person suppose that the state's schools therefore downplayed science teaching during that year?

This is a small-scale study of the relationship between a state's sanction policy and short-term achievement gains. Any "narrowing" questions are simply out of its scope. At a recent conference, co-author Marcus Winters admitted as much when queried by an audience member about potential neglect of non-tested areas: "I'll leave that [question] to the people who have done work on narrowing the curriculum." Indeed.

For all the weight that high schools and colleges place on the ACT and SAT, they're in the dark about why students' scores are sometimes "cancelled." That's because of a 25-year-old policy whereby neither ACT nor the College Board will divulge the reason to a student's current or future school. It doesn't matter if the pupil has an upset stomach or was part of an elaborate and premeditated cheating scheme--each reason is simply reported as an innocuous cancellation. "What we're trying to do is make sure the scores that we send to colleges are valid. It's not our intention to go around punishing students who make mistakes or who've done something they shouldn't have done," said ACT's Ed Colby. Those words, translated to the real world, mean that several Los Angeles students who are suspected of paying their mutual buddy to take the ACT for them will have their scores canceled, but neither their high school nor their intended universities will learn of this unethical behavior. Is that as it should be? Isn't cheating just as important as a test score? The testing outfits' policy doesn't reflect the values that high schools strive to teach and that (we hope) colleges strive to identify in the students they admit. 

"Cheating on ACT, SAT college entrance exams has few consequences," by Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2008

Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews thinks the ed reform lexicon needs a rewrite. He's particularly peeved by the term "achievement gap," which he observes is often used "in a way that suggests narrowing the gap is always a good thing, when that is not so." What if, for instance, the shrinking gap reflected not just a catching-up at the bottom but also a leveling-off at the top? In fact, that's precisely what's happening, as the Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless pointed out in Fordham's recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind, from which Mathews quotes liberally. The danger of such apparent gains for equity is that they shortchange the high-achievers who might grow up to be the nation's future economic and political leaders. Mathews hypothesizes that we have mistakenly "taken our concern about the income gap... and adopted the same vocabulary when we worry about how our children are doing in school.... I can understand distaste for people who build 50-room mansions with gold bathroom fixtures. But can anyone learn too much?" Probably not. The truth is that both America's lowest- and highest-performing students need to be learning lots more.

"Forget About the Achievement Gap," by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, July 14, 2008

Janet S. Hansen
Committee for Economic Development
May 2008

This multi-faceted look at teacher pensions describes the most widely used current plans, their likely sustainability, which teachers benefit from them the most, and options for their redesign. It echoes many findings from our Ohio-specific report on the same topic by economists Michael Podgursky and Bob Costrell, and from the same authors' recent Education Next piece on this subject. Hansen, too, finds that defined benefit (DB) plans (in which retirement payouts are calculated primarily through years of service and final salary) ill-serve many of the educators covered by them--and these are the plans that cover most public-school teachers. Those who fare well under such plans must work for a very long time in the same state or district, while those who exit the profession early or take a teaching job elsewhere suffer acute pension penalties. She contends that the usual alternative to DB plans, namely defined contribution (DC) plans, which are widespread in the private sector, aren't the best answer for teaching. They carry their own issues; the major one is that plan participants, as opposed to sponsors, bear the most risk. Hansen recommends a hybrid called a "cash balance" plan, which she says offers the best of both the DB and DC approaches. It's no secret that teacher pension systems are out of sync with current labor markets and career patterns--and unsustainably expensive, too. This easy-to-digest report helps to explain why.

Julie Greenberg and Kate Walsh
National Council on Teacher Quality
June 2008

The National Council on Teacher Quality evaluated the syllabi and course requirements of elementary math teacher preparation programs across the country and found such programs to be woefully inadequate and to have wildly different ideas about how to produce effective elementary math teachers. The usual scapegoat for the poor math prowess of some elementary students--the comparatively low quantitative ability of their teachers (as evidenced by those teachers' low math SAT scores)--turns out to be just part of the problem. NCTQ found only ten of the seventy-seven elementary math education programs that it examined in forty-nine states to have adequate content and methodology course requirements and only one program (at the University of Georgia) earned truly high marks from the reviewers. Without any standardization of what elementary math teachers need to know, these programs are scattered in both content and methods. Many programs never get around to requiring future elementary teachers to study the content of elementary-school math (though other kinds of math may be on tap). And some have no math-methods courses at all. There's plenty more in this comprehensive report, which you can find here.