The Education Gadfly Weekly

Public Education Network
May 2003

This "action guide" from the Public Education Network (PEN) is a handy resource for those working in communities to develop leadership, capacity, and opportunities for improving "teacher quality." It takes teacher quality to mean both the skills and experiences that teachers bring to their classrooms, and the environment in which they teach. Its core theme is that education improvement efforts are not sustainable unless community members, leaders and policy makers buy into them. "[A]n endeavor that lacks community interest and involvement," write the authors, "is unlikely to gain support from influential decision makers or become a sustainable force for change." The guide offers procedures on the use of data to assess teacher quality and ways to create school and community environments that support teacher quality. To see for yourself, surf to http://www.publiceducation.org/pdf/TQ/PEN_CommActionGuide.pdf.

Gene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education Board
May 2003

Last month, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) came out with a research brief that seeks to explain the factors affecting math achievement in rural schools. Unsurprisingly, the authors found significant gaps today - urban/rural, black/white, etc. But they also found that both black and white students performed better when exposed to a more rigorous college prep curriculum and when teachers held the students to high expectations, which currently teachers seem more apt to do more for whites than blacks. These findings lend support to the NCLB notion that holding all children to the same high standards improves the educational opportunities for even the most low-performing students. It's an interesting, if not earth-shattering, report, which you can find at http://www.sreb.org/programs/hstw/publications/briefs/03V04_ResearchBrief_Math.pdf.

Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett, and Jean Johnson, Public Agenda
May 3, 2003

This new report from Public Agenda is based on a national mail survey of 1,345 public-school teachers, plus focus groups and interviews. (The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation was one of the project's funders and we'll have more to say about its provocative findings in a future Gadfly.) The report provides up-to-date teacher views on a wide variety of topics - some of them heartening, others discouraging, and more than a few confused, contradictory, even schizophrenic. Of course, that may well describe the state of U.S. teachers vis-??-vis a number of contemporary issues and institutions. Like the blind men's elephant, readers are apt to use these data to come to very different conclusions. Of particular interest to me, the survey sample, for the first time in Public Agenda's long history of teacher studies, was split between newcomers to the field (fewer than 5 years of experience) and veterans (more than 20 years in the classroom). Some of the attitudinal differences between these two subsets are striking, with the newer/younger teachers notably more open to a number of contentious policy reforms - and a lot less enamored of (or attached to) their unions. Whether such variations represent true differences between two population cohorts cannot be known from a one-time survey, since it's possible the newcomers will become more like the veterans as they age. But it's also possible that a number of reforms would be more acceptable to teachers if they were phased in, or made optional, such that teachers who see them as pluses - or at least possibilities - could sign up for them while those who cling to the old arrangements are left alone. You can download a copy at http://www.publicagenda.org/aboutpa/pdf/stand_by_me.pdf, or call 212-686-6610 to order a printed copy for $10.

John Wirt et al., National Center for Education Statistics
2003

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has issued the latest in its annual series known as "The Condition of Education." You may not be surprised to learn that it finds "a mixed picture." The good news: American fourth graders are outperforming counterparts from a number of industrialized nations on reading tests. The percentage of high school students taking advanced courses in English is rising. Fourth and eighth graders show measurable gains in math. The worrying news: Fifteen-year-olds are merely average in reading compared to their counterparts in other industrial lands. Math scores for 12th graders, after small gains in the 1990s, have actually declined, with only 17 percent scoring at or above "proficient." Appallingly, a mere 10 percent of 12th graders are at or above proficiency in history. And the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers persists. To get the Commissioner's Statement summarizing the report, go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003067_CommState.pdf. For the full, 327-page, bells-and-whistles version, go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003067.pdf.

Education Commission of the States
May 2003

With funding from the federal "Public Charter Schools Program," the Education Commission of the States has produced four fine policy papers that address the timely and tantalizing idea of "charter districts," which the authors more or less define as school districts (or subdistricts, virtual districts, or parallel districts) in which every school is a charter school (or something similar) and the "central office" doesn't actually run any of them in the traditional way. This is a drum that ECS has been pounding for several years, one that I thought was mostly a fantasy. But when you construe charter districts as these papers do, it turns out that several already exist and others are in the process of becoming. (For the best tour of the present charter-district scene, go to a previous ECS paper called "Charter Districts: The State of the Field," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/37/04/3704.doc.) In the new quartet, Todd Ziebarth authored the paper called "State Policy Options for Creating Charter Districts," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/92/4492.doc. John Augenblick wrote "How Can We Fund Charter Districts?" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/90/4490.doc). Bryan Hassel penned "A New Kind of School District: How Local Leaders Can Create Charter Districts" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/91/4491.doc). And Nelson Smith is the creator of "The New Central Office: How Charter Districts Serve Schools and the Public Interest" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/93/4493.doc). These are smart, knowledgeable, and creative writers at the top of their games, and this collection amounts to a dandy policy handbook for establishing charter districts. Now all that's required are the vision, will and political oomph.

Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, Lucrecia Santibanez, Karen M. Ross, and Catherine H. Chung, RAND Education
2003

This report examines data on school administrators - principals, superintendents, and others - to better understand who they are, where they come from, how much they earn, and a host of other issues. It draws on the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey and much additional literature. Its seven chapters are short and easy to read and include some interesting insights - such as the fact that principals now are older mainly because schools are hiring older candidates these days. Those wanting detail can find a wealth of data in its seventy-four pages of appendices. The authors conclude that, in general, there is no "crisis" in school administration. Plenty of teachers get administrators' certificates, principals' pay has kept pace with managers' pay in other industries, and many who exit the principal's office actually move into other administrative jobs in schools. Yet such averages mask the fact that some schools and districts must struggle to find high-quality leadership. Unfortunately, RAND's cure amounts to minor mid-course corrections. The sensible ones include improving the working conditions for principals and looking to private schools for best practices. Less credible is its suggestion that "schools and districts need to attract high quality potential administrators into the teaching pool." For better advice, we hope you'll turn to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's recently released Manifesto on school leadership, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1. RAND's report is available at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1679/.

Plenty has been written about charter schools and how they are (and aren't) doing, but practically nobody has looked carefully at the organizations that give birth to them, raise them, oversee them, hold them accountable, and decide whether or not they will get their charters renewed. Variously known as "authorizers" and "sponsors," America today has more than 500 of them, ranging from local school boards (the most common by far) to state agencies, specialized boards, universities, and even mayor's offices, city councils, and nonprofit organizations.

It's remarkable that something so important to the success of the charter movement has had so little scrutiny, save for the random media alarum about some sponsor that has allowed a scandal or outrage to develop at one of the schools for which it is responsible. Those stories make for lively reading and cocktail chatter, but they're far from a full picture of what sponsors/authorizers do - and those that quietly do a good job rarely make it onto the front page.

Picture a school's charter as a contract between two parties: the "operator" who wants to run the school and the "authorizer" that determines whether or not this will be allowed to happen and, if so, on what terms. States structure authorizers' responsibilities very differently and individual authorizers go about their tasks even more differently, but how they do it is apt to have as much bearing on the success of the charter movement as what the schools themselves do.

How are today's charter authorizers doing? With funding from the Walton Family Foundation, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute set out to determine this. Our most important move was to engage veteran charter-school analyst Louann Bierlein Palmer, now on the faculty of Western Michigan University, and Rebecca Gau of Arizona State University's Morrison Institute, as lead investigators. A small group of savvy charter experts advised Louann and Rebecca on methodology.

The team made two big methodological decisions. First, they opted to undertake this study at the state level in the two dozen jurisdictions where most charter schools are located - and not to try either to make huge national generalizations or to inspect individual authorizers. Second, they decided to rely for information on some 860 knowledgeable participant-observers in those states, whose judgments were obtained via on-line surveys. The researchers developed an awesome 56-criteria questionnaire (customized by state) designed to probe two big issues: how good a job are the state's major authorizers doing in carrying out six key responsibilities (e.g., awarding charters, overseeing schools, making renewal decisions); and how supportive is the state's policy environment for charter schools and authorizers.

The results are now in and grades have been given. There were no A's or F's - perhaps a result of data averaging - but overall state grades range from B+ (Massachusetts and Texas) to D (New Mexico). Authorizer practices in 15 states were rated B- or better but only 4 jurisdictions had "policy environments" that earned similar grades.

The analysts also came to six big conclusions:

* Most major authorizers are doing an adequate job - some notably better than others, of course - but they're prone to "compliance creep." Everyone knows it's hard to strike the perfect balance between giving a charter school enough autonomy to do its thing while holding it accountable both for its results and for adhering to basic rules of the education road (e.g., non-discrimination, legitimate uses of tax dollars, the handling of special-needs students).

* Few state policy environments are favorable to charter schools and their authorizers. (Yet these 24 jurisdictions are the states with relatively STRONG charter laws!)

* Local school boards generally do not make good authorizers. (There are a few swell exceptions.)

* States with fewer authorizers, serving more schools each, appear to do a better job. (But states need enough sponsors that would-be operators can bring their school dreams to more than one place - and no one authorizer has a monopoly.)

* Quality authorizing costs money - but many authorizers have very little of it. (One solution is to allow them to retain 1-3 percent of school revenues.)

* Higher marks generally went to states where authorizers see themselves responsible not only for overseeing specific schools but also for assisting those schools and serving as advocates for the charter movement as a whole.

Each of these findings has far-reaching policy implications. Let me here address only the one with greatest political volatility: whether local school boards should control authorizing.

Since the onset of the charter movement, that's been the position of the public-education establishment: keep all charter schools under the thumb of district boards. Whenever you find a partial endorsement of the charter idea by card-carrying members of the establishment, it carries that condition (and usually a bunch more).

Despite a handful of terrific exceptions (a few local boards in California or Colorado, say, Houston, the Chicago Public Schools), by and large this study suggests that placing school boards in charge of charter schools is akin to placing McDonalds in charge of Burger King. The sponsor doesn't want the competition, has scant experience in letting some schools be different from others, and doesn't know how to replace command-and-control compliance with results-based accountability.

This is a heated issue in many states as they enact or revamp their charter laws. Under heavy establishment pressure, the California legislature, for example, recently tabled a proposal to widen that state's sponsorship options precisely because many local boards have done a slipshod job. (On the new study, California authorizers earn a woeful D+, as does that state's charter policy environment.) Ohio, on the other hand, recently moved to allow many more entities to sponsor charter schools.

The bottom line is simple: in the charter world, authorizing matters quite a lot. It can be done well but often isn't. It cannot succeed (nor can the schools) without a supportive state policy environment. And it makes little sense to entrust the fate of charter schools to entities that would just as soon drive them all into the sea.

Charter School Authorizing: Are States Making the Grade?, Louann Bierlein Palmer and Rebecca Gau, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, June 5, 2003

In recent weeks, opportunistic charter school adversaries have been having a field day - using state budget crunches and low test scores to fuel the anti-charter fire. In Massachusetts, for example, the state Senate passed a three-year moratorium on the creation or expansion of charter schools, claiming that they are "draining" limited funds from the public school system. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Francis X. Clines argued that the lack of state oversight and control over the spending and operation of charter schools in Texas has led to sub-par schools which unfairly divert "shrinking public funds to private experimentation." The evidence? That 25 of the 200 charter schools that exist in Texas have "gone under or have been closed for management abuses." And, yesterday, a Washington Post editorial questioned the value of charters by citing a comment by school board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz to the effect that "over 50 percent of our charter schools are now failing." (Why the Post singled out charter schools when over 75 percent of D.C. students do not have basic reading skills is unclear.)

Behind these "new" revelations is a lot of political opportunism by charter opponents, deploying as truths the same tired misconceptions about the role that charter schools play in education reform. The fact that 25 low-performing or poorly managed charters closed in Texas in the relatively short time such schools have existed attests to the strength of the accountability measures that exist for charters. How many failing traditional public schools have been closed in the same time period? Such a line of argumentation is proof that champions of the status quo still cling to the discredited idea that it's better to pay indefinitely for life support than to pull the plug on a failing school. Furthermore, though Clines says that "early assessment tests are finding that public schools are outperforming charter schools by nearly a two to one margin," he and other critics do not take into account the fact that charters in most places, particularly Texas, serve a disproportionately disadvantaged student body. Thus, a more accurate measure of the value and effectiveness of these schools would be how much improvement students make from year to year.

The charter school movement emerged out of a need for a different kind of education reform. Traditional public schools, particularly those serving poor and minority students, have built a long record of failing our children while resisting badly needed reforms. Charter schools, along with other alternatives, emerged as a way to help students escape these low-performing schools. The distortions and selective examples that have filled the news in recent months should not be allowed to obscure a basic truth: there are many more shining examples of successful charter schools than failures-and many of the success stories are found in urban areas where students have few options other than failing, poorly managed public schools.

"Senate OK's block to charter schools," by Anand Vaishnav and Nicole Fuller, Boston Globe, May 31, 2003

"Charter schools choke on rulebook," by Joe Mathews, Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2003

"Re-educating the voters About Texas' schools," by Francis X. Clines, New York Times, June 3, 2003

The Milken Family Foundation has created a new (electronic) newsletter tied to its pathbreaking Teacher Advancement Program, but also addressing broader issues of teacher quality. The inaugural issue contains an interesting overview of teacher "pay for performance": where it's been tried, what's happened, what can be learned. You can inspect it at www.mff.org/tap/tap.taf or subscribe by emailing [email protected] and asking to be put on the list.

In March, a group of five education reform-minded Yale undergrads, who had won first prize and $25,000 in cash in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society's 50K competition, published the inaugural edition of Our Education, a journal of education reform put out by the student-led nonprofit "Students for Teachers." [For the Gadfly's review of this journal, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=15#267.] This week, the group launched a new website as part of a movement "to reassert education as a national priority" and to give students a "forum to demand better schools." The site itself is designed to "serve as a comprehensive clearinghouse for the student movement in education reform" and includes information about the latest education reform news, the latest edition of their quarterly journal, surveys of student opinions about education reform, and an online forum where students can discuss teacher and school reform.

Our Education

In contrast to the general sense among school administrators that they are besieged by lawsuits, it turns out that courts tend to rule in favor of schools over both parents and teachers, the two groups most like to sue schools or districts. Since the 1985 Supreme Court case New Jersey v. T.L.O., writes Marjorie Coeyman in the Christian Science Monitor, when the Court ruled that school officials needed only a "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing to search a student's personal possessions, the nation's highest court has consistently ruled in favor of schools on a broad number of issues, including censorship and student conduct. The pattern also holds in lower courts, where schools have won more than half the time and parents and teachers only a third of the time. (The rest of the results are mixed.) Cases involving special education and religion are more complex but, even there, schools will usually prevail. The article suggests that "those who complain that schools must worry so constantly about student and teacher rights that they cannot do their job are simply not looking at the facts."

"Are schools more afraid of lawsuits than they should be?" by Marjorie Coeyman, Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 2003

Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce took up the Ready to Teach Act (H.R. 2211), the first of any number of bills that will feed into reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. This one seeks to align teacher-training programs with the high standards for accountability and results mandated by No Child Left Behind. It would increase accountability by strengthening reporting measures and obliging teacher preparation programs to provide accurate data on their graduates in useful formats; allow federal funds to be used for innovative methods in teacher preparation programs); and focus training on the skills and knowledge needed to prepare highly qualified teachers. In addition, the bill authorizes three new teacher-training grants aimed at improving the quality of preparation programs and bringing a wider range of candidates into traditional and alternative certification programs.

H.R. 2211, The Ready to Teach Act

"Gingrey, House Education Committee Members Offer Bill to Strengthen Teacher Training Programs," Improve Teacher Quality, Committee on Education and the Workforce press release, May 22, 2003

"It may still be a man's world," writes Michelle Conlin of Business Week. "But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's." Conlin runs through an increasingly familiar counter argument to the 1990s social science focus on how girls were supposedly being shortchanged by education. Now it's actually boys who are hurting - with higher rates of drop out, illiteracy, drug abuse, suicide, depression, and anti-social behavior, and lower levels of academic achievement, participation in advanced courses, high school graduation, and college going. For better or worse, girls and women are outperforming boys and men across the educational spectrum, a development with enormous implications for education, marriage, families, law enforcement, the corporate world, etc. What is causing the new gender gap? Conlin says "schools have inadvertently played a big role [by] losing sight of boys - taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began to show the opposite. Some educators feared that it was a blip that would change or feared takebacks on girls' [educational] gains." Schools have also tried to fit boys into an unnatural mold, with the reigning "sit-still-and-listen" model of teaching and the push for earlier and earlier educational achievement holding back these more boisterous and slower-developing creatures. Conlin also suggests, however, that the biggest factor causing the gap may be ideological - the insistence, never mind what is known from biology and physiology, that gender is a social construction with little or no impact on how the sexes learn and develop.

"The new gender gap," by Michelle Conlin, Business Week, May 26, 2003

Education Commission of the States
May 2003

With funding from the federal "Public Charter Schools Program," the Education Commission of the States has produced four fine policy papers that address the timely and tantalizing idea of "charter districts," which the authors more or less define as school districts (or subdistricts, virtual districts, or parallel districts) in which every school is a charter school (or something similar) and the "central office" doesn't actually run any of them in the traditional way. This is a drum that ECS has been pounding for several years, one that I thought was mostly a fantasy. But when you construe charter districts as these papers do, it turns out that several already exist and others are in the process of becoming. (For the best tour of the present charter-district scene, go to a previous ECS paper called "Charter Districts: The State of the Field," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/37/04/3704.doc.) In the new quartet, Todd Ziebarth authored the paper called "State Policy Options for Creating Charter Districts," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/92/4492.doc. John Augenblick wrote "How Can We Fund Charter Districts?" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/90/4490.doc). Bryan Hassel penned "A New Kind of School District: How Local Leaders Can Create Charter Districts" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/91/4491.doc). And Nelson Smith is the creator of "The New Central Office: How Charter Districts Serve Schools and the Public Interest" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/93/4493.doc). These are smart, knowledgeable, and creative writers at the top of their games, and this collection amounts to a dandy policy handbook for establishing charter districts. Now all that's required are the vision, will and political oomph.

Gene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education Board
May 2003

Last month, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) came out with a research brief that seeks to explain the factors affecting math achievement in rural schools. Unsurprisingly, the authors found significant gaps today - urban/rural, black/white, etc. But they also found that both black and white students performed better when exposed to a more rigorous college prep curriculum and when teachers held the students to high expectations, which currently teachers seem more apt to do more for whites than blacks. These findings lend support to the NCLB notion that holding all children to the same high standards improves the educational opportunities for even the most low-performing students. It's an interesting, if not earth-shattering, report, which you can find at http://www.sreb.org/programs/hstw/publications/briefs/03V04_ResearchBrief_Math.pdf.

John Wirt et al., National Center for Education Statistics
2003

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has issued the latest in its annual series known as "The Condition of Education." You may not be surprised to learn that it finds "a mixed picture." The good news: American fourth graders are outperforming counterparts from a number of industrialized nations on reading tests. The percentage of high school students taking advanced courses in English is rising. Fourth and eighth graders show measurable gains in math. The worrying news: Fifteen-year-olds are merely average in reading compared to their counterparts in other industrial lands. Math scores for 12th graders, after small gains in the 1990s, have actually declined, with only 17 percent scoring at or above "proficient." Appallingly, a mere 10 percent of 12th graders are at or above proficiency in history. And the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers persists. To get the Commissioner's Statement summarizing the report, go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003067_CommState.pdf. For the full, 327-page, bells-and-whistles version, go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003067.pdf.

Public Education Network
May 2003

This "action guide" from the Public Education Network (PEN) is a handy resource for those working in communities to develop leadership, capacity, and opportunities for improving "teacher quality." It takes teacher quality to mean both the skills and experiences that teachers bring to their classrooms, and the environment in which they teach. Its core theme is that education improvement efforts are not sustainable unless community members, leaders and policy makers buy into them. "[A]n endeavor that lacks community interest and involvement," write the authors, "is unlikely to gain support from influential decision makers or become a sustainable force for change." The guide offers procedures on the use of data to assess teacher quality and ways to create school and community environments that support teacher quality. To see for yourself, surf to http://www.publiceducation.org/pdf/TQ/PEN_CommActionGuide.pdf.

Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett, and Jean Johnson, Public Agenda
May 3, 2003

This new report from Public Agenda is based on a national mail survey of 1,345 public-school teachers, plus focus groups and interviews. (The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation was one of the project's funders and we'll have more to say about its provocative findings in a future Gadfly.) The report provides up-to-date teacher views on a wide variety of topics - some of them heartening, others discouraging, and more than a few confused, contradictory, even schizophrenic. Of course, that may well describe the state of U.S. teachers vis-??-vis a number of contemporary issues and institutions. Like the blind men's elephant, readers are apt to use these data to come to very different conclusions. Of particular interest to me, the survey sample, for the first time in Public Agenda's long history of teacher studies, was split between newcomers to the field (fewer than 5 years of experience) and veterans (more than 20 years in the classroom). Some of the attitudinal differences between these two subsets are striking, with the newer/younger teachers notably more open to a number of contentious policy reforms - and a lot less enamored of (or attached to) their unions. Whether such variations represent true differences between two population cohorts cannot be known from a one-time survey, since it's possible the newcomers will become more like the veterans as they age. But it's also possible that a number of reforms would be more acceptable to teachers if they were phased in, or made optional, such that teachers who see them as pluses - or at least possibilities - could sign up for them while those who cling to the old arrangements are left alone. You can download a copy at http://www.publicagenda.org/aboutpa/pdf/stand_by_me.pdf, or call 212-686-6610 to order a printed copy for $10.

Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, Lucrecia Santibanez, Karen M. Ross, and Catherine H. Chung, RAND Education
2003

This report examines data on school administrators - principals, superintendents, and others - to better understand who they are, where they come from, how much they earn, and a host of other issues. It draws on the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey and much additional literature. Its seven chapters are short and easy to read and include some interesting insights - such as the fact that principals now are older mainly because schools are hiring older candidates these days. Those wanting detail can find a wealth of data in its seventy-four pages of appendices. The authors conclude that, in general, there is no "crisis" in school administration. Plenty of teachers get administrators' certificates, principals' pay has kept pace with managers' pay in other industries, and many who exit the principal's office actually move into other administrative jobs in schools. Yet such averages mask the fact that some schools and districts must struggle to find high-quality leadership. Unfortunately, RAND's cure amounts to minor mid-course corrections. The sensible ones include improving the working conditions for principals and looking to private schools for best practices. Less credible is its suggestion that "schools and districts need to attract high quality potential administrators into the teaching pool." For better advice, we hope you'll turn to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's recently released Manifesto on school leadership, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1. RAND's report is available at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1679/.