The Education Gadfly Weekly

David J. Armor, Transaction Publishers
July 2003

David J. Armor, professor of public policy at George Mason University, authored this book, which argues that intelligence is hugely important to success in life and also that it is mutable. In other words, one arrives in the world not with a fixed IQ but with intelligence that can be damaged or enhanced, primarily by one's parents and mainly during the pre-school years. Armor spells out ten "risk factors," of which the child is stuck with some (e.g. parents' level of education, birth weight) but others can be improved upon: cognitive stimulation, emotional support, nutrition, etc. After an exhaustive review of the effects of schools and preschools, Armor concludes that, while they indisputably boost almost everyone's level of knowledge, they don't have significant or lasting differential effects on poor kids. Which is to say, "the effects are sufficiently uniform that whatever skill gaps children bring to school tend to be perpetuated through the school career despite special interventions." That leads Armor to conclude that the best way to maximize children's intelligence is via their parents and that the appropriate policy tools entail strengthening parents and families and mitigating the adverse "risk factors." "The ideal program would begin with young people before they become parents, which means targeting teenagers. . . . The program would first encourage completion of as much education as possible. . . . A major goal for prospective parents would be to delay childbirth until all education is completed, and another major goal would maximize the rate of marriage before couples have children. . . . Finally, the program would offer training in parenting skills." He observes that few states have all the elements of such a policy and nowhere are they well integrated. I don't know how realistic this approach is but it's a sobering proposal and a needed reminder that education policy needs to be accompanied by ways of dealing constructively with other potent influences on the lives of young children. The publisher is Transaction Books, the ISBN is 076580185X and you can obtain additional information at http://www.transactionpub.com/cgi-bin/transactionpublishers.storefront.

Gail L. Sunderman and Jimmy Kim, Harvard Civil Rights Projects
February, 2004

Gail L. Sunderman and Jimmy Kim of the Harvard Civil Rights Project authored this quartet of early appraisals of NCLB, which come with an introduction by project co-director Gary Orfield. The first - "Expansion of Federal Power in American Education" - is spectacularly ironic. The Civil Rights Project having argued for years that Washington should play a larger and pushier role in American education, it's downright bizarre to see these folks arguing for flexibility. In "Large Mandates and Limited Resources," they argue, again, for a more flexible approach to accountability than NCLB sets forth. In "Does NCLB Provide Good Choices for Students in Low-Performing Schools?," they supply a fairly perceptive overview of the strengths and (mostly) weaknesses of NCLB's public-school choice program during its first year of implementation, but in "Increasing Bureaucracy of Increasing Opportunities?" they offer a stupid and ideological appraisal of the "supplemental services" program. Keep in mind that the Harvard name doesn't assure thoughtfulness or consistency! Nor, as it turns out, even competent copy editing. (E.g. "Supplemental educational services represents a major tenant [sic] of the law. . . .") You can find this lot at http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressreleases.php/record_id=44/.

Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly, The Abell Report
January 2004

This brief report by Frederick M. Hess and Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute addresses a familiar topic: the "man-made shortage of individuals with the skills, training, knowledge, and desire to lead modern schools and school systems." The authors confront current methods of recruiting and hiring public school principals and superintendents, stating that the "problem is that these licensure rules constrain the pool of potential applicants when there is no evidence that they produce more effective school managers." In May 2003 the Thomas B. Fordham Institute issued its own report, Better Leaders for America's Schools: A Manifesto (see http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1) that offered potential remedies to this problem. The Hess-Kelly piece cites examples of successful school leaders who did not come through the traditional educational frameworks, and brought with them expertise from different fields, which could be especially useful in an "era of heightened accountability, tight budgets, and rapid technological innovation." This report makes straightforward suggestions about how to recruit and hire successful school leaders; encouraging a "simpler, more straightforward standard for hiring principals," perhaps using a focused test that could replace some of the current restrictive requirements for new hires. To read the report for yourself, visit, http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040128_arn104.pdf.

Education Next

Spring 2004

The new edition of Education Next is out this week. We've previously mentioned the lead article, a pathbreaking analysis of the costs of NCLB by Robert Costrell and James Peyser (seehttp://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=134#1661). Other worthy articles include David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas on new research suggesting that tough graders produce better student achievement; Thomas Dee's fascinating attempt to tease out whether being taught by a teacher of the same race has any impact on student achievement; and a learned exchange on civic education between Stephen Macedo and Fordham's Checker Finn. Much good stuff; check it out athttp://www.educationnext.org/20042/.

American students are being overworked, says an alarmed chorus of newspapers, magazines, and books. As described by the popular media and even some academics, the crisis is reminiscent of Sister Carrie and Industrial era child-labor scandals. "Overbooked: Four Hours of Homework for a Third Grader" blared a recent cover of People magazine. Beyond the headlines and behind the expert quotes, however, one discovers a story of political agendas, manipulated data, and a credulous public that wants to believe children are working oh-so-hard, even when they're barely breaking a sweat.

What gave this story credibility were its academic sponsors, Etta Kralovec and John Buell, authors of The End of Homework. What robs their oft-cited work of its credibility, however, are their half-cocked research and political fervor. They reference a newspaper article linking a spate of suicides in Hong Kong to excessive homework, except that the article is from a newspaper in Zimbabwe. Homework, they argue, is anti-democratic and "pits students who can against students who can't." Kralovec and Buell sound like fever-swamp socialists, especially when they complain that homework "fits the ideological requirement of those who maintain the status quo in our politics and society."

Yes, there's a kernel of truth to the anti-homework argument. The evidence that homework provides children with an important educational advantage is inconsistent. University of Missouri professor Harris Cooper, a widely recognized expert on the effects of homework, describes only a modest advantage for students who are given homework as compared to students who aren't assigned any. "Teachers of Grades 4, 5, and 6 might expect the average student doing homework to outscore about 52 percent of equivalent no-homework students."

Homework's benefits, however, increase with age and grade level, becoming especially significant in high school. While "homework's effect on the achievement of elementary school students could be described as 'very small,'" says Cooper, "on high school students its effect would be 'large'." Despite homework's uneven effectiveness, Cooper himself favors the practice, though he's skeptical about the benefits of creative homework that's supposed to teach critical skills. Positive effects increased, he has found, "for subjects for which homework assignments are more likely to involve rote learning, practice, or rehearsal." This is particularly interesting since a stock element of the homework-horror stories in the popular press is the complicated interdisciplinary "project" that takes many hours, days even, to finish and reduces many children, and their parents, to tears. But as it turns out, American elementary, middle, and high school students aren't spending hours on their homework. Minutes is more like it.

The standard reference for debates over how children spend their time is the University of Michigan's 1997 Child Development supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and 1981 Study of Time-Use in Social and Economic Accounts. Recently one of its coauthors, Sandra L. Hofferth, publicly dismissed the whole notion that children are being given so much homework that they have no time for anything else. "I don't believe in the 'hurried child' for a minute. . . .There is a lot of time that can be used for other things." Hofferth and co-author John F. Sandberg have found an increase in homework since 1981 among 3- to 12-year-olds, but the increase is concentrated among the youngest age sets, 3- to 5 and 6- to 8-year-olds. This they credit to an up-tick in the number of students who are doing some homework now but weren't doing any before.

So instead of a dangerously increasing rate of homework among all age groups, Hofferth and Sandburg found increases only among those young enough to have never been assigned homework in the past. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution recently emphasized this same point as he proceeded to drive a stake into the heart of the homework-as-epidemic news articles: "Almost everything in this story [of overworked students] is wrong."

Even the increase among the youngest students is being blown out of proportion, Loveless explains. The amount of time that 3- to 5-year-olds spend on homework per week has risen by 11 minutes since 1981, raising the total homework burden to 7 minutes per night. The per-night increase for 6- to 8-year-olds stands at 15 minutes. Bringing the total number of minutes surrendered to homework to a hardly-shocking 25 per night.

Among older age groups, there is even evidence that homework is decreasing. The National Assessment of Education Progress reports that in 1988, 17 percent of 13-year-olds said they had received no homework assignments the day before filling out the questionnaire. In 1999, that number climbed to 24 percent. And among high school students, for whom homework has been shown to be rather effective in boosting academic achievement, the hours spent per week on homework is actually falling. In 1987, the UCLA survey of college freshmen found that 47 percent said they spent more than five hours a week doing homework as high school seniors; in 2002, only about one-third of respondents could say the same.

A small number of students may well be carrying an insupportable load of unhelpful homework. The Brookings report notes that 5 percent of fourth graders have more than two hours nightly. Still, the problem is a local rash, not a national crisis. Why then, with such empirical shortcomings, have homework horror stories been treated as sociologically significant? Clearly, American parents want to believe that their little angels are so hard-working and such good students, they may be too good. Indeed, too good to be true.

David Skinner is an assistant managing editor of The Weekly Standard and the editor of Doublethink, a quarterly magazine published by America's Future Foundation. A longer version of this article appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of The Public Interest

The great British historian, Lord Macaulay, thought that talk of some sort of "golden age" was nonsense. "No man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present," he noted. It is in this spirit that we review this week's collection of sob stories on how NCLB, testing, standards, and assorted ills have ruined the magical teaching and learning that supposedly took place daily in U.S. classrooms before the onset of this draconian regimen called standards-based reform. In the Washington Post Magazine, Virginia teacher Emmet Rosenfeld complains that his state's Standards of Learning have driven him out of the Fairfax County classroom he occupied for a decade. "The intense pressure to raise test scores eventually squeezed the life out of school, both for my kids and for me," Rosenfeld complains. One of his fellow teachers notes with a sigh that he hasn't had the time for his annual coffeehouse: "Desks draped with tapestries, espresso maker bubbling in the background. Kids recited poetry into a microphone or played confessional songs on guitar." We don't even know what to say about this. A Time magazine article expresses a similar sentiment. Until recently, Garfield/Franklin elementary in Muscatine, Iowa was a bastion of progressive learning - students went "eagle watching on the Mississippi River, to the University of Iowa's Museum of Natural History, and have two daily recesses." But apparently, many students couldn't actually read the exhibits at the museum. Until the school redoubled its efforts to prepare students for the state's accountability test (i.e., to teach them basic computation skills and reading), barely half achieved minimal proficiency in reading and math on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Now, according to Ripley, "the percentage of fourth-graders who passed the reading test rose from 58 percent to 74 percent; in math, proficiency went from 58 percent to 86 percent." But Franklin elementary "has become a very different place. The kids are better readers and mathematicians and test takers" but teachers "bemoan a loss of spontaneity, breadth, and play - problems money won't fix." Spontaneous illiteracy: now there's an educational outcome for you.

"The best answer," by Emmet Rosenfeld, Washington Post Magazine, February 22, 2004

"Beating the bubble test," by Amanda Ripley, Time, March 1, 2004

Does the Supreme Court's decision in Locke v. Davey - concerning a college scholarship for underprivileged students that was denied to a divinity student attending an evangelical college - have implications for the debate about vouchers and the effort to roll back Blaine Amendments in 32 states? (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=125#1565 and http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=24#102 for earlier coverage of this case.) At first blush, it seems not. The seven-justice majority was clearly bending over backwards to craft a narrow ruling, with Chief Justice Rehnquist closing his opinion with the admonition that the Court "need not venture further into this difficult area" in upholding the Washington State program - a pretty clear reference to the voucher debate. But while we'd like to agree with the Institute for Justice, which argued the case, that the court "made it very clear that the training of ministers was the only issue presented in Locke v. Davey," we suspect that Justice Scalia is correct. He closed his dissent by noting, "Today's holding is limited to training the clergy, but its logic is readily extendible, and there are plenty of directions to go." Scalia mentions one - denying ministers Medicare benefits on grounds that a state benefit was flowing to a religious entity. We'd add another, and predict that someone is going to sue to bar theology students from federal student tuition aid programs. And yes, one of those directions, we imagine, will be attempts to overturn state K-12 voucher programs for their supposed collusion with religious education. A Supreme mess.

Supreme Court Slip Opinion in Locke v. Davey, February 25, 2004,

"Supreme Court approves denial of divinity scholarships," by David Stout, New York Times, February 25, 2004 (registration required)

In a diverse suburb just outside Chicago, Evanston Township High School officials are thinking about pulling out of NCLB, "saying that the financial benefits might not be worth the trouble." Though the school would still be held accountable to Illinois' "less stringent penalties if students do not meet standards," it would likely not be required to disaggregate student scores as NCLB requires, and could "avoid having to offer private tutoring or to allow students to transfer to higher-achieving districts if the school does not reach state testing goals." That would, however, be bad news for some students at Evanston Township High School. According to the Chicago Tribune, the school "didn't make adequate progress because not enough African American and low-income students passed reading and math tests." So while it's not clear that the celebrated school is adequately educating all of its students, thanks to its whopping $46 million annual budget, Evanston has the luxury of opting its high school out of NCLB. School board member Jane Colleton jokingly proposed having a bake sale to make up the $80,000-$90,000 the school would lose in Title I dollars. "There are so many people who don't like No Child Left Behind. We can get a lot of teachers to bake and buy," she quipped. "We might be able to make up that money."

"Evanston school may quit 'No Child'," by Jodi S. Cohen and Lisa Black, Chicago Tribune, February 23, 2004

True, Rod Paige should not have called the National Education Association "a terrorist organization." Given the times in which we live, the middle word in that phrase might have been better chosen. (How about "hostile"? "Disgraceful"? "Selfish?" "Anti-child?") But we're cheered by Paige's frequently memorable turns-of-phrase and his stubborn insistence on calling a spade what it is rather than a teaspoon. Such character is in short supply in Washington. Already, the Education Secretary gets credit for the best line in recent political memory, when he described the NCLB opposition as "a coalition of the whining." And we loved his give-no-ground apology for this week's gaffe. In honor of this transformation of mild-mannered educator into take-no-prisoners warrior, we'd like to sponsor a contest for the best description of the NEA. Is it a union of mass destruction? A group of dead-enders? Don't limit yourself to war-on-terror comparisons; let your creative juices flow. Gadfly serves as judge, with points given for wit, style, and economy of phrasing. Multiple entries are encouraged. Author of the best description gets his or her name in next week's issue and a much-desired Fordham tee shirt. Send your entries to [email protected].

"Paige calls NEA 'terrorist organization,'" by John King, CNN, February 23, 2004

"Paige's point," Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2004, (subscription required)

While it doesn't have quite the shock value of accusations of terrorist leanings, the battle over three proposed Massachusetts charter schools lacks little for controversy. Tuesday, the state board of education approved the new schools in a near-unanimous vote, despite an ugly public relations effort by opponents that included accusations that one of the schools, to be headed by an Eastern European immigrant, would feature a "Soviet-style" curriculum. Opponents also pushed board chairman James Peyser to recuse himself from the vote because he works with the New Schools Venture Fund, which provides funding and technical assistance to charter schools. Parents also accused teachers in the affected districts of dragooning students into writing letters to the state board opposing the charters, using students to gather petition signatures, and threatening children that, if the charters were approved, public school band programs would be terminated. In at least one case, the effort may have backfired, as one board member said her decision to vote for a new grammar- and reading-focused charter school was confirmed by receiving misspelled and grammatically incorrect letters from high school students. "I don't think it should be gone through with if it does get excepted Marlboro High School will lose money it doesn't have," one letter read. The battle continues, with three Massachusetts mayors pledging to sue in state court to block the schools from opening this fall.

"Education board OK's 3 charter schools," by Suzanne Sataline, Boston Globe, February 25, 2004

"Mayor presses charter lawsuit; BArT hires its own attorneys," by Karen Gardner, North Adams Transcript, February 24, 2004

"Hostility inflames charter school debate," by Suzanne Sataline, Boston Globe, February 22, 2004

"Opponents eye conflict of interest in upcoming vote on charter plans," by Peter Schworm, Boston Globe, February 22, 2004

David J. Armor, Transaction Publishers
July 2003

David J. Armor, professor of public policy at George Mason University, authored this book, which argues that intelligence is hugely important to success in life and also that it is mutable. In other words, one arrives in the world not with a fixed IQ but with intelligence that can be damaged or enhanced, primarily by one's parents and mainly during the pre-school years. Armor spells out ten "risk factors," of which the child is stuck with some (e.g. parents' level of education, birth weight) but others can be improved upon: cognitive stimulation, emotional support, nutrition, etc. After an exhaustive review of the effects of schools and preschools, Armor concludes that, while they indisputably boost almost everyone's level of knowledge, they don't have significant or lasting differential effects on poor kids. Which is to say, "the effects are sufficiently uniform that whatever skill gaps children bring to school tend to be perpetuated through the school career despite special interventions." That leads Armor to conclude that the best way to maximize children's intelligence is via their parents and that the appropriate policy tools entail strengthening parents and families and mitigating the adverse "risk factors." "The ideal program would begin with young people before they become parents, which means targeting teenagers. . . . The program would first encourage completion of as much education as possible. . . . A major goal for prospective parents would be to delay childbirth until all education is completed, and another major goal would maximize the rate of marriage before couples have children. . . . Finally, the program would offer training in parenting skills." He observes that few states have all the elements of such a policy and nowhere are they well integrated. I don't know how realistic this approach is but it's a sobering proposal and a needed reminder that education policy needs to be accompanied by ways of dealing constructively with other potent influences on the lives of young children. The publisher is Transaction Books, the ISBN is 076580185X and you can obtain additional information at http://www.transactionpub.com/cgi-bin/transactionpublishers.storefront.

Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly, The Abell Report
January 2004

This brief report by Frederick M. Hess and Andrew Kelly of the American Enterprise Institute addresses a familiar topic: the "man-made shortage of individuals with the skills, training, knowledge, and desire to lead modern schools and school systems." The authors confront current methods of recruiting and hiring public school principals and superintendents, stating that the "problem is that these licensure rules constrain the pool of potential applicants when there is no evidence that they produce more effective school managers." In May 2003 the Thomas B. Fordham Institute issued its own report, Better Leaders for America's Schools: A Manifesto (see http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1) that offered potential remedies to this problem. The Hess-Kelly piece cites examples of successful school leaders who did not come through the traditional educational frameworks, and brought with them expertise from different fields, which could be especially useful in an "era of heightened accountability, tight budgets, and rapid technological innovation." This report makes straightforward suggestions about how to recruit and hire successful school leaders; encouraging a "simpler, more straightforward standard for hiring principals," perhaps using a focused test that could replace some of the current restrictive requirements for new hires. To read the report for yourself, visit, http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040128_arn104.pdf.

Gail L. Sunderman and Jimmy Kim, Harvard Civil Rights Projects
February, 2004

Gail L. Sunderman and Jimmy Kim of the Harvard Civil Rights Project authored this quartet of early appraisals of NCLB, which come with an introduction by project co-director Gary Orfield. The first - "Expansion of Federal Power in American Education" - is spectacularly ironic. The Civil Rights Project having argued for years that Washington should play a larger and pushier role in American education, it's downright bizarre to see these folks arguing for flexibility. In "Large Mandates and Limited Resources," they argue, again, for a more flexible approach to accountability than NCLB sets forth. In "Does NCLB Provide Good Choices for Students in Low-Performing Schools?," they supply a fairly perceptive overview of the strengths and (mostly) weaknesses of NCLB's public-school choice program during its first year of implementation, but in "Increasing Bureaucracy of Increasing Opportunities?" they offer a stupid and ideological appraisal of the "supplemental services" program. Keep in mind that the Harvard name doesn't assure thoughtfulness or consistency! Nor, as it turns out, even competent copy editing. (E.g. "Supplemental educational services represents a major tenant [sic] of the law. . . .") You can find this lot at http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressreleases.php/record_id=44/.

Education Next

Spring 2004

The new edition of Education Next is out this week. We've previously mentioned the lead article, a pathbreaking analysis of the costs of NCLB by Robert Costrell and James Peyser (seehttp://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=134#1661). Other worthy articles include David N. Figlio and Maurice E. Lucas on new research suggesting that tough graders produce better student achievement; Thomas Dee's fascinating attempt to tease out whether being taught by a teacher of the same race has any impact on student achievement; and a learned exchange on civic education between Stephen Macedo and Fordham's Checker Finn. Much good stuff; check it out athttp://www.educationnext.org/20042/.