The Education Gadfly Weekly

Michael Fullan, London: RoutledgeFalmer
2003

There has been much research on reforming schools but less on fixing the systems in which they're embedded. Michael Fullan, a Canadian educator who has worked extensively in his home country, the US and the UK, jumps into this opening with an investigation of what it takes to produce "sustainable system change." His book is informed by efforts at large-scale reform in the United Kingdom and in large American urban districts, such as San Diego and District 2 in New York City. Fullan says it can be done, that "over the last five or so years we have learned how to improve literacy and numeracy in large systems." But this is just the threshold to greater progress. To improve student performance more broadly, make it sustainable, and get teachers to buy into it requires, says Fullan, a shared moral purpose, the effective coordination of bottom-up and top-down reforms, and quality leadership at all levels. He also asserts that such change is too rapid and dynamic for any one person to control and manage; needed instead is "distributed leadership," which "requires people to operate in networks of shared and complementary expertise rather than in hierarchies." In short, if a system seeks sustainable reform, it must create an environment that identifies, nurtures and rewards leaders at every level from the classroom to the superintendency or ministry. This book offers some big ideas and is a worthy read for those interested in systemic reform. To order a copy, surf to http://www.routledgefalmer.com/.

Consortium on Chicago School Research
Melissa Roderick, Mimi Engel and Jenny Nagaoka
February 2003

This report takes a comprehensive look at the Chicago Public Schools' Summer Bridge program, which provides summer instruction to third, sixth and eighth graders who fail to achieve the test scores necessary to advance to the next grade. The program is mandatory for such students and current serves about 21,000 of them annually. It's become a key component of the district's effort to end social promotion. This study concludes that the program basically works: students' test scores do improve, helping many to pass to the next grade. And gains aren't confined to those closest to the test cutoff; in some cases, the lowest scoring students posted large gains. Further, students claim to enjoy the program more than the regular school year, and attendance--typically quite low in summer schools--often exceeds 90 percent. However, the authors also find that Summer Bridge "does not change students' experiences during the school year." Instead, students generally return to their previous learning rates, with some modest improvements. And unfortunately, this report makes only a half-hearted attempt to measure the program's cost, so whether it's a better investment than other interventions remains an open question. Still, the report provides great detail about Summer Bridge's distinguishing features (notably small classes and a centralized curriculum) and cites much other research on summer schools. You can find your own copy on-line at http://www.consortium-chicago.org/publications/p59.html.

Brian Crosby, Capital Books, Inc.
2002

Though the title implies that the author will argue for whopping teacher salaries as a way to improve education, Brian Crosby's proposals are actually far more nuanced, though no less controversial. He thinks we've wasted billions on education reform that has been misdirected toward curriculum and standards development, small schools, smaller classes, and--worst of all--state testing. Instead, he says, the only way to improve education is to refocus our resources on improving the teacher workforce. This, in turn, requires establishment of a pay scale that rewards quality and hard work, providing administrators more flexibility to dismiss ineffective teachers, and granting teachers the same perks granted to other kinds of professionals. (Unfortunately, Crosby tends to treat state certification and recognition by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as proxies for teacher quality.) While conceding that his proposals will be expensive, the author says such an increase would be marginal if we eliminated other--in his view fruitless--reform schemes (including programs such as Title 1) and redirected those resources into teacher salaries and benefits. For information about obtaining this book, go to http://www.100000teacher.com/.

William G. Ouchi, Bruce S. Cooper, Lydia G. Segal, Tim DeRoche, Carolyn Brown, and Elizabeth Galvin
The Anderson School of Management, UCLA
Working paper, July 25, 2002 (revised September, 2002)

Long an important topic in business schools, the question of how organizations should be structured has rarely been asked of schools, mainly because they are notoriously difficult to analyze. This interesting new report tries to determine whether school systems are best organized using a centralized or decentralized approach. The authors sort nine systems into three categories. Most centralized are large urban districts (New York, L.A. and Chicago), which follow a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure. Least centralized are three diocesan Catholic systems (again in New York, L.A., and Chicago), which cede almost total control to individual schools. In the middle are those few public school districts (here Houston, Seattle and Edmonton) that allow individual schools to make important decisions (such as hiring teachers and choosing curricula) and centralize only those decisions that bring economies of scale (such as insurance and payroll management). The differences in the extreme are striking. With 1211 public schools, New York City has 8,000 people working in central offices (and another 17,000 who work in schools but are effectively part of the central office structure); the New York archdiocese, by contrast, has 286 schools and just 22 people working in its central office. In the end, the authors find that sizable variations in school performance are associated with such differences. Decentralized systems put more of their resources into the classroom, are better able to monitor performance, and had students that did better on standardized tests. They also had fewer scandals and incidents of corruption, despite maintaining smaller compliance staffs. Such results are consistent with the business literature, which has long accepted the wisdom of empowering those closest to the information with authority to make important decisions. Hopefully education, too, will come to recognize that "organizations that are highly centralized and bureaucratic are less likely to innovate and perform effectively" and that efforts to decentralize decision-making (e.g. empowering principals and supporting charter schools) may have great benefits. The authors acknowledge that their sample of districts is small, but these results should prod others to examine this topic in greater depth. Without understanding how organizations work, how can we expect to improve anything as complicated as a school system? To view this working paper, visit http://www.rppi.org/asq.doc; the authors will soon release a book based on their study.

Former teachers often say they left the classroom because of a lack of "administrative support." Often what they mean is that school administrators failed to back them up when they tried to enforce classroom discipline or punish students for cheating or plagiarism. An article in the Baltimore Sun illuminates both sides of this struggle. Teachers grumble about the time and paperwork required to impose penalties like suspension, expulsion, or failing grades, and note that their efforts are often thwarted by administrators who cave in to the threat of litigation and to well-connected parents who call the school board. They also complain that, when they send disruptive students to the principal's office, the kids are often sent back to class, which signals to other students that misbehaving is not taken seriously. Administrators point to court decisions that, they say, tie their hands by expanding the due-process rights of students. They also blame teachers for not resolving discipline problems themselves, noting that most office referrals come from a small number of teachers.

"Teachers say the law adds to disorder in classroom," by Jonathan Rockoff, Baltimore Sun, March 23, 2003.

Teach for America (TFA) has begun asking school districts to contribute $1500 for each teacher they hire from the program. The national program--which recruits top college graduates, trains them over the summer to teach in high-need schools, places them in classrooms, and supports them while they teach--spends about $8,000 to develop each TFA corps member. Donors who support Teach for America want receiving districts to help offset this cost, according to a TFA spokesperson.

"Teach for America wants districts to pay per teacher," by Sarah Anchors, The Arizona Republic, March 20, 2003.

(NB: This Arizona Republic article gets some facts wrong. The dollar figures in our blurb are correct; those in the Republic article are not.)

Bring back Richard Rothstein! The space his education column formerly occupied in the Wednesday New York Times is often filled nowadays by the grumpy Michael Winerip, who seems bent on proving that everybody in America hates the No Child Left Behind act. His latest contribution was last week's column reporting "pervasive dismay" with NCLB across the land. "As I travel the country," Winerip writes with evident relish, "I find nearly universal contempt for this noble-sounding law."

To be sure, the Gadfly has itself fussed on occasion about NCLB, but commentaries such as Winerip's come close to letting people off the hook by condoning a public-education system that isn't doing a satisfactory job today and resists doing anything differently tomorrow. If the view settles over educator-land that NCLB sets hopeless goals, needn't be taken seriously and can be dismissed on grounds that Uncle Sam isn't covering the full costs of compliance, then much of America should resign itself to twenty more years of flat scores, wide gaps and semi-educated kids. Whereas A Nation at Risk was greeted by a chorus of Pollyannas who asserted that its basic analysis was wrong and that everything was really copacetic in American education, NCLB seems to be attracting a choir of defeatists, especially state officials who say, in essence, "You just can't expect us to do all those things. They're too hard, too disruptive and you're not giving us enough money." Too bad the lead education voice in America's "newspaper of record" is singing along with that choir. The effect is to deny that the problems NCLB seeks to address are grave enough to warrant painful changes in established practices. As Secretary Paige recently told state board members, "In order to make a difference, we have to operate the situation differently. That change is difficult. But change is required." If NCLB fails, America may as well forget standards-based reform, which is the same as forgetting tens of millions of needy kids.

Meanwhile the evidence continues to roll in that standards, testing and accountability work--so long as states stick to their game plans and are undeterred by protesters and defeatists. Massachusetts reports that 90% of the high school class of 2003 has now passed the core English and math sections of the Bay State's demanding MCAS high-school graduation test (with more re-testing opportunities still ahead for those who haven't yet cleared the bar-- see link below for more information). Texas announced the other day that more than 80 percent of its third-graders have passed that state's new and tougher TAKS reading test, a larger fraction than just about anyone expected in the first round of TAKS. (Texas is following its past practice of gradually raising its "cut-score" over several years. In this initial administration of the English-language reading test, 89 percent of 3rd graders passed; 81 percent got scores that would qualify them as passing against the higher standard planned for 2005. Scores on the Spanish-language reading test were a bit lower.)

Are such results flukes or part of a pattern? A heated debate rages as to whether statewide accountability systems boost academic performance or --as a pair of Arizona State University academics, including uber-Pollyanna David Berliner claim--have no effect, or even make things worse. While that debate will persist, the best analyses I've seen of multi-state, multi-year evidence conclude that state accountability systems have the hoped-for effect most of the time. A forthcoming issue of Education Next will present such a review by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond. (An early version of that analysis can be found at http://edpro.stanford.edu/eah/papers/accountability.Harvard.publication%20version.pdf.) It's time to consider whether most protests against standards-based, test-driven state accountability systems have more to do with objections to the concept--and to change itself--than with credible evidence that such systems don't work.

Do not, however, doubt the determination of resisters to stick by the regime under which they have thrived. The most dogged of them may turn out to be the ed schools, which (along with the teacher unions) one might term public education's version of Iraq's "Republican Guards." Feeling beset on many fronts--including NCLB's requirement that every classroom must have a "highly qualified" teacher, Rod Paige's continuing push for "alternative certification," widespread Congressional criticism of ed schools, and anxieties about the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act--the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education is girding for battle. Earlier this month, president David Imig circularized his deans with an astonishing amalgam of delusion, strategy and spin. Excerpts follow:

"I know that virtually every education school is doing a commendable job. We continue to be the most accountable unit on the campus and are fulfilling our obligations for the NCLB challenges. Our need is to tell our story in more compelling ways to the policy makers and the public. Until we do so, we can expect to see efforts to make education schools even more accountable to Washington&.My purpose in writing is to urge you to make your local U.S. Congressman a friend of your education school&.When you respond, use the language of No Child Left Behind and demonstrate your commitment to that legislation&.Consider inviting your Representative to give the Commencement Address this Spring but insist that they spend some time hearing your newly minted teachers brag about their program and how well it prepared them to teach in challenging schools&."

Instead of trekking around the land to hear state officials beat up on NCLB, maybe Michael Winerip should consider listening to ed school deans praise it. Evaluating their veracity would be fit work for the New York Times.

"A pervasive dismay on a Bush school law," by Michael Winerip, The New York Times, March 19, 2003.

* * *

As mentioned above, 90 percent of Massachusetts students in the class of 2003 have already passed the state's challenging high school exit exam. A new publication from the Partnership for Learning in Washington state looks at what it took to achieve these results and what other states can learn from Massachusetts.

"The Massachusetts Miracle," Education Matters, March 12, 2003.

* * *

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, R.I.P. As this Gadfly was taking wing, word came that Pat Moynihan had died. (He was ill with complications following an emergency appendectomy as well as the accumulated maladies of his 76 years.) Much will be written and said in the days ahead about this extraordinary man--described by the Almanac of American Politics as the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson. I simply want to note that he was my main mentor during my twenties and thirties, my doctoral advisor, my boss in three amazing jobs, my premier guide into the worlds of public policy and education research, my passport to India (and the family I acquired there) and a source of endless inspiration. We didn't see each other much in recent years--my loss--but his influence endures not only in my work but in that of hundreds of others whose lives he touched.

While many inner-city Catholic schools struggle to survive, and more than a few shut down, three innovative models of Catholic middle and high schools are spreading across the country. In Cristo Rey high schools, which now exist in four cities and will soon expand to six more sites, students earn much of their tuition by working in banks, law firms, and other businesses needing clerical help. At Nativity and San Miguel middle schools, now found in several dozen cities, the school day has been lengthened and instruction has been intensified. While all Catholic schools face shortages of priests and nuns and others willing to teach for very low salaries, these new models often raise support from outside benefactors to make ends meet.

"Lifting Hope, One Job at a Time," by Jay Mathews, The Washington Post, March 25, 2003.

"Finding a way out," by Mary Ann Zehr, Education Week, March 19, 2003.

The largest but perhaps least well known of Florida's three voucher programs is providing scholarships to private schools for more than 15,000 children this year and has exhausted the $50 million that policymakers allowed for it. The Florida Corporate Income Tax Credit Scholarship program lets businesses divert a portion of their taxes to organizations that provide poor children with up to $3,500 in private school tuition. Though there was little advertising for the program, about 55,000 parents applied for the scholarships for their children; many are now on waiting lists. The bill's sponsor hopes to expand the program to as much as $150 million, which would save Florida nearly $1 billion in education costs over the next eight years, since the state would otherwise pay public schools an average of $5600 to educate each child.

"Tax vouchers trigger rush," by Denise-Marie Balona, Orlando Sentinel, March 21, 2003.

With the reauthorization process finally creaking into motion for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), lawmakers of both parties--and both houses of Congress--say this is now a top priority for 2003. In the first of what will doubtless prove to be many rounds, House Republicans last week introduced a bill calling for reforms that focus on accountability and results for students rather than on bureaucratic compliance. Proponents assert that there is wide agreement about what aspects of special education are in greatest need of reform, such as over-identification of minorities and the classification of many illiterate students as "learning disabled," although it seems certain that specific reform proposals will stir much debate.

The new GOP bill contains accountability provisions that mirror those found in the No Child Left Behind Act, including requirements that all special ed teachers be "highly qualified," and that states align their accountability systems for disabled students with the guidelines laid out in NCLB. Two years ago, in the NCLB context, there was much talk of bipartisan support for such requirements, but consensus for similar provisions in IDEA may prove hard to come by. Democrats have already faulted the Bush team for not providing adequate funding for states to comply with NCLB, and now some complain that, despite unprecedented increases in special education funding, the Administration is dooming reform prospects by not boosting the federal share to the "fully funded" (if arbitrary) forty percent level. Democrats will likely also take issue with the choice provisions contained in an IDEA "companion bill," introduced last Thursday by Rep. Jim DeMint (R-SC), which encourages states to experiment with special-ed voucher programs akin to Florida's McKay scholarship program.

Other sticky political wickets will be reforms in school discipline and IDEA special-ed litigation. Today, in effect, schools must apply different disciplinary standards to disabled students. Under the GOP bill, they could establish uniform discipline practices for all pupils. To minimize litigation, this bill would also encourage early mediation and create opportunities for voluntary binding arbitration. The measure would also require parents to cite specific grievances in a formal complaint and to file such a complaint within a year of a school infraction.

H.R. 1350, Improving Educational Results for Children with Disabilities Act of 2003.

H.R. 1373, IDEA Parental Choice Act of 2003.

House Republicans Propose Reforms to Improve Educational Results for Children with Disabilities, Press Release from the Committee on Education and the Workforce.

"House Republicans unveil IDEA overhaul," by Lisa Fine Goldstein, Education Week, March 26, 2003.

"Battles over funding, school choice plague special-ed reauthorization," by Bill Swindell, Congressional Quarterly, March 15, 2003 (not available online)

The U.S. Department of Education has issued guidance on how the requirements of the No Child Left Behind act should be interpreted as affecting charter schools. It includes specifics on how the highly-qualified-teacher requirement applies to charters, whether such schools must to make adequate yearly progress like other public schools, and how the public school choice and supplemental services provisions impact charter schools. While several of these "clarifications" are exceedingly complex and may prove clumsy to implement, it appears that the Department has done a conscientious job of trying to reconcile the dictates of NCLB with the singularities of charter schools. Still, one wonders if there may be a basic mismatch between an idea (charters) that wants schools to do things differently and a massive federal law that essentially wants them all to do the same things. The guidelines can be found at www.ed.gov/offices/OII/choice/charterguidance03.doc.

In his online Class Struggle column, Jay Mathews praises a new book by Tom Toch called High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education. While small schools are in vogue today, boosted in part by many dollars from the Gates Foundation, skeptics wonder whether size alone can determine school effectiveness. Toch's book contends that small schools may not have an edge if they don't have a coherent educational vision but that it's easier to attain such unity of purpose in a small school than in a large one.

"Smaller High Schools Proving to be Educationally More Effective," by Jay Mathews, Washingtonpost.com, March 25, 2003.

High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education, by Thomas Toch, is due to be released by Beacon Press in April 2003. Its ISBN is 080703245X.

A new report from the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) finds that the nation's largest school districts are making significant gains on state tests, often improving faster than rural and suburban districts. Eighty-seven percent of grades in big-city districts posted gains in math between 1997 and 2002, and 44 percent improved faster than the state average. In reading, 72 percent of grades improved, with 47 percent bettering the state average. "Relentless and sustained focus...on improving achievement" is responsible for the gains, according to Michael Casserly, the executive director of CGCS.

"City Districts Show Gains in Series of School Tests," by Greg Winter, The New York Times, March 25, 2003.

The report, Beating the Odds: A City-by-City Analysis of Student Performance and Achievement Gaps on State Assessments is available at http://www.cgcs.org/pdfs/bto3.pdf.

Brian Crosby, Capital Books, Inc.
2002

Though the title implies that the author will argue for whopping teacher salaries as a way to improve education, Brian Crosby's proposals are actually far more nuanced, though no less controversial. He thinks we've wasted billions on education reform that has been misdirected toward curriculum and standards development, small schools, smaller classes, and--worst of all--state testing. Instead, he says, the only way to improve education is to refocus our resources on improving the teacher workforce. This, in turn, requires establishment of a pay scale that rewards quality and hard work, providing administrators more flexibility to dismiss ineffective teachers, and granting teachers the same perks granted to other kinds of professionals. (Unfortunately, Crosby tends to treat state certification and recognition by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as proxies for teacher quality.) While conceding that his proposals will be expensive, the author says such an increase would be marginal if we eliminated other--in his view fruitless--reform schemes (including programs such as Title 1) and redirected those resources into teacher salaries and benefits. For information about obtaining this book, go to http://www.100000teacher.com/.

Consortium on Chicago School Research
Melissa Roderick, Mimi Engel and Jenny Nagaoka
February 2003

This report takes a comprehensive look at the Chicago Public Schools' Summer Bridge program, which provides summer instruction to third, sixth and eighth graders who fail to achieve the test scores necessary to advance to the next grade. The program is mandatory for such students and current serves about 21,000 of them annually. It's become a key component of the district's effort to end social promotion. This study concludes that the program basically works: students' test scores do improve, helping many to pass to the next grade. And gains aren't confined to those closest to the test cutoff; in some cases, the lowest scoring students posted large gains. Further, students claim to enjoy the program more than the regular school year, and attendance--typically quite low in summer schools--often exceeds 90 percent. However, the authors also find that Summer Bridge "does not change students' experiences during the school year." Instead, students generally return to their previous learning rates, with some modest improvements. And unfortunately, this report makes only a half-hearted attempt to measure the program's cost, so whether it's a better investment than other interventions remains an open question. Still, the report provides great detail about Summer Bridge's distinguishing features (notably small classes and a centralized curriculum) and cites much other research on summer schools. You can find your own copy on-line at http://www.consortium-chicago.org/publications/p59.html.

Michael Fullan, London: RoutledgeFalmer
2003

There has been much research on reforming schools but less on fixing the systems in which they're embedded. Michael Fullan, a Canadian educator who has worked extensively in his home country, the US and the UK, jumps into this opening with an investigation of what it takes to produce "sustainable system change." His book is informed by efforts at large-scale reform in the United Kingdom and in large American urban districts, such as San Diego and District 2 in New York City. Fullan says it can be done, that "over the last five or so years we have learned how to improve literacy and numeracy in large systems." But this is just the threshold to greater progress. To improve student performance more broadly, make it sustainable, and get teachers to buy into it requires, says Fullan, a shared moral purpose, the effective coordination of bottom-up and top-down reforms, and quality leadership at all levels. He also asserts that such change is too rapid and dynamic for any one person to control and manage; needed instead is "distributed leadership," which "requires people to operate in networks of shared and complementary expertise rather than in hierarchies." In short, if a system seeks sustainable reform, it must create an environment that identifies, nurtures and rewards leaders at every level from the classroom to the superintendency or ministry. This book offers some big ideas and is a worthy read for those interested in systemic reform. To order a copy, surf to http://www.routledgefalmer.com/.

William G. Ouchi, Bruce S. Cooper, Lydia G. Segal, Tim DeRoche, Carolyn Brown, and Elizabeth Galvin
The Anderson School of Management, UCLA
Working paper, July 25, 2002 (revised September, 2002)

Long an important topic in business schools, the question of how organizations should be structured has rarely been asked of schools, mainly because they are notoriously difficult to analyze. This interesting new report tries to determine whether school systems are best organized using a centralized or decentralized approach. The authors sort nine systems into three categories. Most centralized are large urban districts (New York, L.A. and Chicago), which follow a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure. Least centralized are three diocesan Catholic systems (again in New York, L.A., and Chicago), which cede almost total control to individual schools. In the middle are those few public school districts (here Houston, Seattle and Edmonton) that allow individual schools to make important decisions (such as hiring teachers and choosing curricula) and centralize only those decisions that bring economies of scale (such as insurance and payroll management). The differences in the extreme are striking. With 1211 public schools, New York City has 8,000 people working in central offices (and another 17,000 who work in schools but are effectively part of the central office structure); the New York archdiocese, by contrast, has 286 schools and just 22 people working in its central office. In the end, the authors find that sizable variations in school performance are associated with such differences. Decentralized systems put more of their resources into the classroom, are better able to monitor performance, and had students that did better on standardized tests. They also had fewer scandals and incidents of corruption, despite maintaining smaller compliance staffs. Such results are consistent with the business literature, which has long accepted the wisdom of empowering those closest to the information with authority to make important decisions. Hopefully education, too, will come to recognize that "organizations that are highly centralized and bureaucratic are less likely to innovate and perform effectively" and that efforts to decentralize decision-making (e.g. empowering principals and supporting charter schools) may have great benefits. The authors acknowledge that their sample of districts is small, but these results should prod others to examine this topic in greater depth. Without understanding how organizations work, how can we expect to improve anything as complicated as a school system? To view this working paper, visit http://www.rppi.org/asq.doc; the authors will soon release a book based on their study.