The Education Gadfly Weekly

Council for Basic Education
March 2004

The Council for Basic Education has gone back to its roots of defending liberal arts education with this report, which describes principals' perception of whether the amount of classroom time being devoted to reading, math, science, social studies/history, civics, geography, foreign language, and the arts - all central to a well-rounded liberal arts education - has increased or decreased over the past several years, and whether they expect it to increase/decrease in the near future. CBE undertook this study out of concern that, despite the many positive potential benefits of NCLB, that statute "may well contribute to a significant danger that has not received the attention it deserves: At a time when school budgets are under extraordinary stress, the exclusive focus on the law's accountability provisions on mathematics, reading, and, eventually, science is diverting significant time and resources from other academic subjects." Not surprisingly, survey results tend to confirm this suspicion: about 75 percent of schools have increased their instructional time devoted to reading, math, and science and authors found "ample evidence of waning commitment to the arts, foreign language, and elementary social studies," particularly in schools with high minority populations. For example, while only nine percent of low-minority school principals reported a decrease in the instructional time devoted to foreign languages, 23 percent of principals in high-minority schools reported such decreases. This trend was even more acute in social studies, where, overall, 29 percent of elementary principals reported decreases in instructional time while nearly half of principals in high minority schools reported such declines. The CBE report does not, however, mention the likelihood that these high minority schools need to devote more instructional time to remediation if their students are to meet the minimum requirements mandated by NCLB. Perhaps total instructional time needs to increase. A related question is whether the extra time for reading and math will end as more students reach proficiency in those subjects. We hope CBE will revisit this issue after several years of NCLB implementation. To access a copy of the report for yourself, visit http://www.c-b-e.org/PDF/cbe_principal_Report.pdf.

Larry Cuban, Teachers College Press
January 2003

Veteran Stanford educationist Larry Cuban based this 96-pager on his Julius & Rosa Sachs Lectures at Teachers College two years back. Think of it as a broadside trained against the standards-based reform fleet, which Cuban terms a "corporate-inspired reform coalition." He says the "present educational orthodoxy is bad for American schools" for four reasons: (1) The goal of preparing students to succeed in an "information-based workplace has largely overwhelmed the fundamental purpose of tax-supported public schools in a democracy," namely building citizens. (2) There's no credible evidence that students who pass tests and finish high school will go on to succeed in college and employment. (3) The "nurturing of a one-best-school" ignores student differences and the "historic diversity of 'good' schools." (4) Schools and students are overburdened with responsibility for making this regimen succeed while society's "structural inequalities" (e.g. racism, poverty) get ignored. A cri-de-coeur, to be sure, from a literate, passionate and decent man with long experience in the education trenches. But it's also stereotypical educationist thinking tinged with Marxist paranoia, and it doesn't offer much of an alternative to the regimen that he laments. Have a look, if you will. The ISBN is 0807742945 and you'll find more information at http://store.tcpress.com/0807742945.shtml.

Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning and the Education Commission of the States
February 2004

This report can be seen as an introductory course on the methods used by education researchers and as a guide to basic statistics. Its purpose is to help the non-statisticians among us decipher and appraise research reports. It points out a number of common pitfalls that often snag lay readers of stats-heavy writing and helps explain how to avoid them. For example, when drawing conclusions about research, it's important not to assume that correlation equals causation, to apply research results to a setting that differs from the tested environment, or to rely overmuch on conclusions drawn from small sample sizes (which can produce statistically insignificant results). The guide is easy to read, avoids excessive detail and has a handy index of terms. Those who study education but lack a quantitative background may want it on their shelves. This is the second in a series funded by the Department of Education to "improve the connection between research and policy" (We reviewed the first, Eight Questions on Teacher Preparation: What Does the Research Say?, at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=110#1383.) You can find this new resource online at http://www.ecs.org/html/educationIssues/Research/primer/index.asp.

Kyle Stevens, Trafford Publishing
2004

There are lies, damn lies, and then there are literature textbooks, which teacher Kyle Stevens here charges with gross malfeasance for filling the heads of students with error and misinformation. The monograph is not long enough to be a sustained examination along the lines of Diane Ravitch's recent Fordham report on history textbooks (see http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=329). But it does note specific instances in which interpretative or contextual remarks in major literature textbooks are simply wrong - wrong in their assessment of how historical or cultural events affected great works of literature, wrong in how they lay out the development of literary trends and movements, and often just plain wrong about facts. Stevens calls on teachers and students to throw out their textbooks and engage the great works themselves, free of the interpretative miasma of error-riddled textbooks. And while he occasionally veers into pedantry - is it so wrong to call the statesman and theologian Thomas More "a churchman," for example? - Stevens certainly impresses with his passionate defense of great literature as essential to the education of the young. You can buy the book at http://www.trafford.com/4dcgi/view-item?item=4353&66235740-22714aaa#goto2

Education Secretary Rod Paige announced this week that the Department of Education will relax NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" requirements. Critics contend that the move is a "tactical retreat" designed to quell criticism of the law, which has been growing stronger as state lawmakers across the political spectrum threaten to eschew Title 1 dollars to avoid having to comply with NCLB's mandates. Paige insists, however, that the new policies are simply an attempt to "offer common-sense solutions that will help states and districts get the best teachers in front of the most needy students as soon as possible." The changes include: offering teachers in rural areas who are highly qualified in one subject three additional years to become highly qualified in additional subjects they teach; giving newly hired teachers three years to demonstrate qualification; and allowing states to use their own certification standards to determine competence for teachers who cover more than one field. While many groups - notably the NEA - have welcomed the changes as evidence that "the debate is no longer on whether NCLB and its implementation is flawed and needs to be fixed, but on what needs to be fixed," Ross Weiner of the Education Trust predicts that allowing such "flexibility" will give states "an invitation to define their problems away, instead of a call to tackle them head-on." These rules, he says, "extend a pattern of disowning and diminishing the teacher quality provisions in the law, and postpones the day when public education will realize its goal of equal opportunity for all."

"Softening of 'No Child Left Behind,'" by Gail Russell Chaddock, Christian Science Monitor, March 16, 2004 

"Rules eased on upgrading U.S. schools," by Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times, March 16, 2004  (registration required)

"It was a political hit that would make Tony Soprano blush." Just hours before the New York City Panel for Education Policy - successor to the Big Apple's school board - was to vote on Mayor Bloomberg's controversial plan to hold back third graders who failed the city's math and reading tests, the mayor axed two of his own hand-picked board members and orchestrated the firing of a third, all of whom were threatening to oppose the policy. "This is what mayoral control is all about," Bloomberg said. "A few of the [board] members didn't agree or were afraid they'd be pressured by outsiders or politicized, so I replaced them with people who agreed with my views." Not surprisingly, the move enraged the mayor's critics, including United Federation of Teachers' president Randi Weingarten, who called it a "Monday night bloodbath." "Mayor Bloomberg manages the Department of Education by instilling fear," assailed Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. This week's hit on the city's school board members was the last straw for Weingarten and Diane Ravitch, both of whom initially supported Bloomberg's takeover of the city's schools. Today, the pair called on the state legislature to "re-establish an independent board of respected citizens to set policy for the schools" because the mayor's reorganization of city schools and the way he and his team set policy not only leaves "out any role for public involvement, it has also led to serious malfunctioning of school services." Even those who agree with the idea of ending social promotion in the city are questioning the mayor's eleventh-hour decision to re-stack the board in his favor. In an editorial, the New York Daily News credited the mayor for a "bracing display of authority" but criticized his methods, saying the process "wasn't pretty, and the fault resides with the mayor. He chose his representatives to the panel more than a year before he announced his third-grade retention policy with apparently little thought as to where they stood on social promotion." As we said last week: Hizzoner has a habit of acting before he has fully engaged with the likely consequences of action.

"Public schools, minus the public," by Diane Ravitch and Randi Weingarten, New York Times, March 18, 2004

"Bloomberg expels ed panel dunces," New York Daily News, March 16, 2004, 

"Mike and pals 'fire' away to end free pass for school kids," by Carl Campanile and David Seifman, New York Post, March 16, 2004, 

"Promote vote stacked," by Celeste Katz, Joe Williams, and David Saltonstaff, New York Daily News, March 16, 2004

In this space, Michael Kirst recently provided a useful commentary comparing the time it took to implement the original Title I to the present controversies over implementing the No Child Left Behind act. (To glimpse NCLB's future, look to the past, January 8, 2004) However, he was unable to explain why this reauthorization of Title I, unlike any in the program's long history, has engendered such grassroots resistance. At the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. from 1969 to 1993, I played an active role as an advocate for enforcing the original Title I and later as a strong supporter of reforming the program. In 1969, I co-authored the report, Title I: Is It Helping Poor Children?, that led to the first reforms of the program. Having participated in much of that history, I offer my own explanation for the unprecedented opposition to the current law.

NCLB has grabbed the education community's attention like no previous ESEA reauthorization. It has really upset the status quo in state and local offices and has shaken the complacency of educators and parents about their schools' performance. For the first time, district and school officials are actually being required to take serious and urgent action in return for federal funds. Title I has been around so long that it has come to be seen as an entitlement - a part of the basic foundation program in school districts. In its longevity, Title I has acquired a payroll supporting some people in the same positions for decades. Title I dollars may have been a small part of a district's total budget, but the money was always theirs. An associate superintendent once told me that the reason she liked Title I so much was that she didn't have to do anything to get it. She didn't mean that literally, of course. She meant that the district didn't have to write proposals to compete for grant dollars because the money was allocated by a formula based on the number of resident children from low-income families. Of course, there were fiscal and program rules to follow, and after the reauthorization in 1988 and especially in 1994, Title I began setting expectations for improved student achievement. But the federal policy instruments to achieve this goal were weak, and enforcement was impotent. And the money kept flowing, depending always on the number of poor children, not the actions of schools or school systems.

Now, some tougher requirements have been enacted through NCLB. At the grassroots, districts and schools find these mandates distasteful. They hate having schools branded as needing improvement, as if this is somehow a shameful reflection on their earnest efforts, rather than an opportunity to help struggling students. Educators want credit for growth in student achievement, even if lower-achieving students continue to lag behind. The rule for testing 95 percent of all students is ridiculed as unworkable, instead of being seen as insurance against excluding children from accountability. An Education Week poll found that 84 percent of all teachers rejected the concept that special education students should be expected to meet the same academic standards as their non-disabled peers. Administrators don't want to give up control of their federal dollars to set-asides, to transportation, to external providers of tutoring, or to upgrading the credentials of teachers and aides in Title I schools. All the public exposure and public reporting requirements are alien to some districts and states. For the first time in Title I's history, there is serious talk of giving up the entitlement in order to avoid the federal strings. Notice, however, that most of the opposition to No Child Left Behind comes from politicians and is based on ideology (or a desire for even more money), not from educators dependent on that steady revenue stream.

While critics of the law have dominated media coverage of the law's implementation trail, many thousands of other teachers and administrators at all levels are conscientiously implementing the new requirements. They may find them difficult, impossible, or inconvenient, but they are doing what the law asks. Many educators recognize that for too long, special education students have been held to a lower standard and that average scores disguised huge gaps among groups of students. It may be that there is greater acceptance of the new law at the grassroots than all the public comments of superintendents, state policy makers, union spokesmen, newspaper columnists, ed school critics, and editorial writers would have us believe. Just as the original legislation had to be amended to ensure that funds were not used as general aid or to supplant state and local funds, the present law will undoubtedly require some adjustments to fulfill its purpose. Adjustments, however, should not permit wholesale retreat from implementing the fundamental commitment to educating poor and minority children.

Phyllis McClure is a Washington-based, independent consultant with a 35-year history of advocacy on making Title I an effective federal instrument for securing educational opportunities for minority and poor children. She was a member of Independent Review Panels for National Assessments of Title I from 1990-1993 and 1995-2001.

U.S. News & World Report has a fantastic special issue on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. One of the articles therein, "Unequal Education," is as fine a lay-of-the-land piece on education we've seen in many a year. It highlights the importance of setting standards, testing regularly, and upgrading expectations at every level of K-12 education, and even ventures into the more controversial area of cultural expectations and their effects on student achievement. The story also profiles a number of successful schools that serve minorities and the tough-love approach they've taken with students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. The issue is well worth the newsstand price.

"Unequal education," U.S. News & World Report, March 22, 2004

It's March Madness time, and not even Gadfly is immune to the pleasures of a couple of weeks of serious college basketball. (We're taking Duke, with a revived Maryland as the potential sleeper, though Stanford remains the sentimental favorite of a few bleeding hearts in the office.) But we're not alone in one nagging worry: that high-stakes college sports have a tremendously bad effect on higher education. Gregg Easterbrook offers a deeply disturbing rundown of the graduation rates of major college basketball programs on his blog for The New Republic. Most major college basketball programs - the 25 or 30 programs with even an outside shot at the NCAA title - have such appalling graduation rates, especially for black scholarship recipients, that they have actually ceased to report such numbers (on highly specious privacy grounds, to be sure). Even otherwise stringent schools (such as Duke) graduate basketball scholarship recipients at half or less the rate of other students. And when athletes do graduate, their degrees are frequently shams, as demonstrated by the recent scandal over an absurdly easy final exam administered by assistant coach Jim Harrick, Jr. to a physical education class favored by scholarship recipients at the University of Georgia. (Question 5: How many halves are in a college basketball game?) Though today the NCAA has promised to crack down on programs with abysmal graduation rates, it's clear that high-stakes athletics has a deeply compromising effect on academics at schools that divert resources and emphasis into building a contending basketball program. St. Joe's, are you listening?

"NCAA Preparing to call penalties on schools," by Liz Clarke, Washington Post, March 18, 2004

"He's 6' 5," has a 17.3 PPG and a 8.2 RPG and don't you dare ask about his GPA," by Gregg Easterbrook, Easterblogg on TNR.com, March 15, 2004

"Three points, two credits, no net," The Smoking Gun, March 4, 2004

"Marching through madness," by Welch Suggs, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2004

The push is on to open up the job of authorizing charter schools to more entities. (See Fordham's report on charter school authorizing, which advocated just such a move, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=67). So far, however, success is rare. We reported a few weeks ago about a bill in Colorado to create a statewide authorizing board (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=138#1698); that bill is still pending. In California, the indomitable Caprice Young, head of the statewide charter association, is pushing the General Assembly to approve a plan to allow state universities and community colleges to issue charters. And in Idaho, an attempt to create a statewide board to issue charters - a major plank of Gov. Dirk Kempthorne's charter reform package - failed, though the board will now hear appeals from schools whose applications are rejected or whose charters are not reissued. The move came after an intense legislative fight over whether Idaho's charters were serving their intended populations or functioning as havens for middle class kids whose parents were looking to spring them from local district schools.

"Teachers, boards accept charter school reform package," Associated Press, March 15, 2004  (registration required)

"The big picture on charter schools gets swept to the side," Idaho Statesman, March 16, 2004

"Bill would relax charter school rules," by Suzanne Pardington, San Jose Mercury News, March 15, 2004

Council for Basic Education
March 2004

The Council for Basic Education has gone back to its roots of defending liberal arts education with this report, which describes principals' perception of whether the amount of classroom time being devoted to reading, math, science, social studies/history, civics, geography, foreign language, and the arts - all central to a well-rounded liberal arts education - has increased or decreased over the past several years, and whether they expect it to increase/decrease in the near future. CBE undertook this study out of concern that, despite the many positive potential benefits of NCLB, that statute "may well contribute to a significant danger that has not received the attention it deserves: At a time when school budgets are under extraordinary stress, the exclusive focus on the law's accountability provisions on mathematics, reading, and, eventually, science is diverting significant time and resources from other academic subjects." Not surprisingly, survey results tend to confirm this suspicion: about 75 percent of schools have increased their instructional time devoted to reading, math, and science and authors found "ample evidence of waning commitment to the arts, foreign language, and elementary social studies," particularly in schools with high minority populations. For example, while only nine percent of low-minority school principals reported a decrease in the instructional time devoted to foreign languages, 23 percent of principals in high-minority schools reported such decreases. This trend was even more acute in social studies, where, overall, 29 percent of elementary principals reported decreases in instructional time while nearly half of principals in high minority schools reported such declines. The CBE report does not, however, mention the likelihood that these high minority schools need to devote more instructional time to remediation if their students are to meet the minimum requirements mandated by NCLB. Perhaps total instructional time needs to increase. A related question is whether the extra time for reading and math will end as more students reach proficiency in those subjects. We hope CBE will revisit this issue after several years of NCLB implementation. To access a copy of the report for yourself, visit http://www.c-b-e.org/PDF/cbe_principal_Report.pdf.

Kyle Stevens, Trafford Publishing
2004

There are lies, damn lies, and then there are literature textbooks, which teacher Kyle Stevens here charges with gross malfeasance for filling the heads of students with error and misinformation. The monograph is not long enough to be a sustained examination along the lines of Diane Ravitch's recent Fordham report on history textbooks (see http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=329). But it does note specific instances in which interpretative or contextual remarks in major literature textbooks are simply wrong - wrong in their assessment of how historical or cultural events affected great works of literature, wrong in how they lay out the development of literary trends and movements, and often just plain wrong about facts. Stevens calls on teachers and students to throw out their textbooks and engage the great works themselves, free of the interpretative miasma of error-riddled textbooks. And while he occasionally veers into pedantry - is it so wrong to call the statesman and theologian Thomas More "a churchman," for example? - Stevens certainly impresses with his passionate defense of great literature as essential to the education of the young. You can buy the book at http://www.trafford.com/4dcgi/view-item?item=4353&66235740-22714aaa#goto2

Larry Cuban, Teachers College Press
January 2003

Veteran Stanford educationist Larry Cuban based this 96-pager on his Julius & Rosa Sachs Lectures at Teachers College two years back. Think of it as a broadside trained against the standards-based reform fleet, which Cuban terms a "corporate-inspired reform coalition." He says the "present educational orthodoxy is bad for American schools" for four reasons: (1) The goal of preparing students to succeed in an "information-based workplace has largely overwhelmed the fundamental purpose of tax-supported public schools in a democracy," namely building citizens. (2) There's no credible evidence that students who pass tests and finish high school will go on to succeed in college and employment. (3) The "nurturing of a one-best-school" ignores student differences and the "historic diversity of 'good' schools." (4) Schools and students are overburdened with responsibility for making this regimen succeed while society's "structural inequalities" (e.g. racism, poverty) get ignored. A cri-de-coeur, to be sure, from a literate, passionate and decent man with long experience in the education trenches. But it's also stereotypical educationist thinking tinged with Marxist paranoia, and it doesn't offer much of an alternative to the regimen that he laments. Have a look, if you will. The ISBN is 0807742945 and you'll find more information at http://store.tcpress.com/0807742945.shtml.

Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning and the Education Commission of the States
February 2004

This report can be seen as an introductory course on the methods used by education researchers and as a guide to basic statistics. Its purpose is to help the non-statisticians among us decipher and appraise research reports. It points out a number of common pitfalls that often snag lay readers of stats-heavy writing and helps explain how to avoid them. For example, when drawing conclusions about research, it's important not to assume that correlation equals causation, to apply research results to a setting that differs from the tested environment, or to rely overmuch on conclusions drawn from small sample sizes (which can produce statistically insignificant results). The guide is easy to read, avoids excessive detail and has a handy index of terms. Those who study education but lack a quantitative background may want it on their shelves. This is the second in a series funded by the Department of Education to "improve the connection between research and policy" (We reviewed the first, Eight Questions on Teacher Preparation: What Does the Research Say?, at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=110#1383.) You can find this new resource online at http://www.ecs.org/html/educationIssues/Research/primer/index.asp.