The Education Gadfly Weekly

Paul Shaker and Elizabeth Heilman
Policy Perspectives, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
January 2002

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) may mean well but it's irrevocably cast in the role of apologist for the nation's ed schools and what goes on in them. This sometimes means striking back at those who find fault with conventional teacher training and certification, with conventional ed-school style research, etc., and savaging those who engage in independent studies that arrive at "outside the ed school box" conclusions. A particularly nasty version of this retribution recently appeared in Policy Perspectives, an AACTE newsletter. There we find a piece called "Advocacy Versus Authority-Silencing the Education Professoriate", by Paul Shaker of California State University at Fresno and Elizabeth E. Heilman of Purdue University. It tries to find fault with numerous critical reports and studies, ranging from A Nation at Risk to the recent report of the National Reading Panel, from Diane Ravitch's book Left Back to CREDO's recent study of the Teach for America Program in Houston to the journal Education Next, and so forth. Its essential argument seems to be that the "critics" haven't a scholarly leg to stand on but are winning the policy fights because the ed school professoriate is too na??ve, quiet and inner-directed to hold its own. It never occurs to Shaker and Heilman that, to the extent that critics are making some headway, it might be due to their compelling evidence, stronger analysis and more cogent argumentation. If you want to see for yourself, you can go to www.edpolicy.org/perspectives/archives/free_issue.htm.

Jerry P. Gollub, et al.
National Academy of Science, Committee on Programs for Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in American High Schools
February 2002

Diane Ravitch opined on this National Research Council "study" in last week's Gadfly but it's worth another comment, particularly amidst reports that elite private schools are dropping Advanced Placement courses so as to concentrate on idiosyncratic, teacher-built courses, and in light of last week's report that Harvard will henceforth award credit only to those who score "5" (the top mark) on A.P. exams. In this lengthy study (only the uncorrected, pre-publication version of which is presently available, and that for a stiff price), the National Academy of Science's Committee on Programs for Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in American High Schools essentially tries to impose N.C.T.M. math and a similar view of science on two long-standing, external "gold standard" high school curriculum-and-assessment programs, the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) program and the International Baccalaureate (IB). The gist of the critique is that these programs are too heavy on content coverage and skill development and too light on conceptual understandings. The authors don't see the AP and IB as external tests of important skills and knowledge but, rather, as teaching strategies that, they assert, should be "made consistent with findings from recent research on how people learn". In other words, it's not knowledge of the disciplines that should form the core of these programs, as it long has, but, rather, principles of cognitive psychology and pedagogy. Constructivist principles. AP and IB, in this view, are about the process of learning, not about what's been learned. Probably we should not be surprised, considering that the committee that prepared it was stuffed with educationists, including NCTM heavyweight John Dossey and veteran progressive-educator Jeannie Oakes. This report was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton Administration (jointly by the National Science Foundation and the Education Department's Office of Educational Research and Improvement.) It will be interesting to see whether its recommendations are taken seriously by the private organizations that sponsor the AP and IB programs, and by the Bush administration (whose National Science Foundation recently hired committee member Michael Martinez as a program officer). It seems unlikely that the "research" cited in this report meets the standards of scientific proof mandated in the recent No Child Left Behind act. If you'd like to read the pre-print, surf to http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10129.html for information about obtaining a copy.

Final Report, David Myers, Paul Peterson, et al.
Mathematica Policy Research and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance
February 2002

David Myers, Paul Peterson and colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance issued this lengthy study the day before the U.S. Supreme Court heard the Cleveland voucher case. It reviews three year's of evidence from a large, privately funded voucher program in New York City. The "bottom line" is interesting but ambiguous. Taken as a whole, low-income children who attended private schools with the assistance of these scholarships did not academically surpass the control-group children who remained in the public schools. However, when the results are separately analyzed for black youngsters (44 percent of those in the sample studied here), the researchers found statistically-significant academic achievement gains, amounting to about 9 additional points on combined reading-math tests for those who spent all three years in the private schools. The Hispanic youngsters in the program, however, showed no effect. This finding parallels those reported earlier from similar programs in Washington, D.C. and Dayton, Ohio: they make a measurable difference for African-American youngsters but not for others who are just as poor. Why? Nobody is sure, though theories abound. The New York report also reviews data on many other aspects of the school experience (e.g. parental satisfaction, discipline, homework). On almost all such indicators, the scholarship students in private schools fare better than their public-school counterparts. You can get your own copy in PDF form by surfing to http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/Press%20Releases/nycchoicerel.htm and following the directions.

Kalman Hettleman.
The Abell Foundation
February 2002

The Baltimore-based Abell Foundation has produced another excellent education report, this one written by Kalman Hettleman and addressing the problems of special education in that city's schools. It's especially timely as the President's Commission on Special Education (which you can read about at http://www.ed.gov/inits/commissionsboards/whspecialeducation/) buckles down to its review of the federal IDEA program with an eye toward the possible reform of same. 50 pages long, Hettleman's report paints a devastating picture of a failed program and goes on to outline a comprehensive overhaul. Because it documents these problems in a real urban setting, it provides a valuable case study of special education in action (or perhaps inaction) and ought to capture the attention of policymakers and special educators alike. You can get a PDF version by surfing to www.abell.org and hunting there. You can also request a hard copy by phoning (410) 547-1300, faxing (410) 539-6579 or emailing [email protected].

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is less than two months old but it's already yowling and a lot of people are nervous about it, not unlike new parents unsure how best to soothe a crying infant.

This is an enormous piece of legislation that possibly nobody has read from cover to cover. Spanning dozens of programs and thousands of specific features, it ranges from Indian education to impact aid, from teacher quality to bilingual education, and on and on.

Its heart and muscle, however, are its provisions dealing with standards, testing, adequate yearly progress and accountability at the state and school levels. This is the part of the act that got the most attention, stirred the most controversy, is perhaps the most different from previous versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and is fraught with the greatest uncertainty as its implementation proceeds.

No matter what one thought of the President's initial proposal (which I liked a great deal) or of the compromises and alterations that Congress worked in it (many of which I didn't like nearly so much), NCLB is now the law. Surely everyone wants it to work effectively in carrying out its stated purposes: boosting student achievement, improving schools, giving people better information and closing long-lasting and troubling performance gaps, so that, indeed, no child will be left behind.

The standards, testing and accountability provisions are at the core of this hope. But they turn out to be quite complicated and somewhat mysterious. Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen. The United States is a country in which people hold different ideas of what constitutes good education and what's reasonable to expect from schools. Congress left many key decisions to the executive branch and the states and we cannot yet know how they're going to handle these weighty responsibilities. There's also reason to be worried by reports of weak implementation of past rounds of E.S.E.A. Moreover, NCLB embodies an idiosyncratic set of compromises between what the fifty states have discretion to do differently and what they must all do uniformly. To recall just the most obvious example: under NCLB, states may set their academic proficiency bars wherever they like but, whether they set them high or low, and no matter where their students are today in relation to those bars, every state has the same twelve years to get all its children over those bars. (An article by Lynn Olson in the February 20 issue of Education Week looks at how the definition of proficiency varies across the states. See "A 'Proficient' Score Depends on Geography.")

Many groups have recently issued guides to NCLB and analyses that seek to tackle some of these implementation issues. The Education Commission of the States has come out with "No State Left Behind: The Challenges and Opportunities of ESEA 2001." The Education Leaders Council has published "The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Summary by Issue," (not yet on the web; call 202-261-2600 for ordering information). The Learning First Alliance produced "Major Changes to ESEA in the No Child Left Behind Act."

At the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, we, too, asked what we could usefully do to help the country prepare for the challenges ahead. We began with the premise that everyone wants NCLB to work but there's no unanimity on how that can or should happen and plenty of reason to worry about things that could go wrong, not be done at all, be done badly, not be foreseen, etc.

So we invited seven smart people (two of whom enlisted colleagues, making for eleven smart authors) to examine some of these issues. We asked them to write short, fast, accessible papers on specific topics pertaining to implementation of NCLB's standards, testing and accountability requirements. On the whole, we think they did a pretty terrific job. You can find their papers, together with perceptive commentaries by Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools and Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in No Child Left Behind: What Will It Take?, available on our website at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/NCLBreport.pdf.

These papers and comments were aired at a lively, well-attended conference held in Washington on February 13. (Also speaking there were three additional commenters and Gene Hickok, America's very able Undersecretary of Education, who bears much of the executive branch responsibility for NCLB's implementation. A short article in Education Week by Erik Robelen describes the highlights of the meeting. See "Intestinal Fortitude" in the February 20th issue.)

You may not be surprised to discover that the authors and commenters found some disagreements as well as a lot of shared perspectives. For example, Lisa Keegan and her colleagues at the Education Leaders Council are more bullish about what can be done with norm-referenced tests than is Achieve's Matt Gandal.

I would come down differently on some of these issues, myself. I also recognize that some are so intricate that another analyst, tackling the same topic, might reach a different view of what the law provides and what the available data show.

Still, this report warrants the attention of anyone interested in NCLB's implementation. But please bear in mind that this is a moving target. The Education Department is gearing up for "negotiated rulemaking." Much is in flux. That's why we concluded that getting this report into cyberspace as quickly as possible would be more helpful than slowly trundling forth with a fully edited volume of the traditional sort.

We invite your comments and feedback. We have no agenda other than to advance the debate in a constructive way. This is part of an earnest effort to read NCLB's entrails in the hope that, if we understand them better, and are smart about what can and should and shouldn't happen, maybe we can boost the odds that this will indeed work well for American children, especially the neediest among them.

Heated arguments about the most effective form of reading instruction continue to polarize the teaching community, but yet another review of the research has found beyond dispute that "teaching that makes the rules of phonics clear will ultimately be more successful than teaching that does not." So conclude five professors of psychology, linguistics and pediatrics in a cover story in this month's Scientific American, "How Should Reading Be Taught?" by Keith Rayner, Barbara Foorman, Charles Perfetti, David Pesetsky, and Mark Seidenberg, Scientific American, March 2002.

Two years ago, the Cincinnati Public Schools launched a teacher evaluation system in which teachers were measured against 17 standards, with the results to be linked to compensation and career advancement for individual teachers. Last week, the district announced that teachers who rated the highest under the evaluation system also produced the greatest gains in student achievement. The evaluation system rates teachers based on whether they meet standards like giving tests aligned with the district's standards and using content-specific instructional strategies. For the study, the district looked at individual student scores on achievement tests and compared student improvement rates to teachers' evaluation ratings, according to an article by reporter Jennifer Mrozowski in the Cincinnati Enquirer. "The study found the basic design of the teacher evaluation system is sound and worth continuing," said Jack Lewis, the district's director of research and evaluation. For details see "Study links teacher quality and student progress," by Jennifer Mrozowski, Cincinnati Enquirer, February 21, 2002.

If you spent last week on another planet and missed the press coverage of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on the Cleveland voucher program, you can catch up with the help of The Economist ("School Vouchers: A Supreme Opportunity," February 23, 2002.)

President Bush's commission on special education, charged with recommending areas of reform to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), held hearings in Houston this week. Some expected the hearings to be attended only by representatives of special education advocacy groups opposed to any changes in IDEA, which is soon up for reauthorization. Instead the panel heard from a range of witnesses -- including state education officials from Texas and New York, as well as some advocacy groups -- calling for the federal government to focus on accountability for results instead of compliance with procedural rules, according to a story in the San Antonio Express-News. An open letter to the President's commission, identifying key areas of IDEA that urgently need reforming, was released earlier this week by Lisa Graham Keegan (Education Leaders Council), William J. Bennett (former Secretary of Education, now at Empower America), and Chester E. Finn, Jr. (Thomas B. Fordham Foundation). While the House of Representatives is planning to take up the issue of special education this summer (after the President's commission issues its recommendations), the legislation is likely to be contentious and Hill staffers do not expect serious work on the bill until 2003, according to a report in Education Week.

"Experts want focus to be on results," by Sharon Hughes, San Antonio Express-News, February 26, 2002.

Open letter to the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education from Lisa Graham Keegan, William J. Bennett, and Chester E. Finn, Jr., available at http://www.educationleaders.org/issues/020222branstad.htm or call 202-261-2600.

"Forecast for IDEA restructuring: Not this year," by Lisa Fine, Education Week, February 20, 2002.

Final Report, David Myers, Paul Peterson, et al.
Mathematica Policy Research and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance
February 2002

David Myers, Paul Peterson and colleagues at Mathematica Policy Research and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance issued this lengthy study the day before the U.S. Supreme Court heard the Cleveland voucher case. It reviews three year's of evidence from a large, privately funded voucher program in New York City. The "bottom line" is interesting but ambiguous. Taken as a whole, low-income children who attended private schools with the assistance of these scholarships did not academically surpass the control-group children who remained in the public schools. However, when the results are separately analyzed for black youngsters (44 percent of those in the sample studied here), the researchers found statistically-significant academic achievement gains, amounting to about 9 additional points on combined reading-math tests for those who spent all three years in the private schools. The Hispanic youngsters in the program, however, showed no effect. This finding parallels those reported earlier from similar programs in Washington, D.C. and Dayton, Ohio: they make a measurable difference for African-American youngsters but not for others who are just as poor. Why? Nobody is sure, though theories abound. The New York report also reviews data on many other aspects of the school experience (e.g. parental satisfaction, discipline, homework). On almost all such indicators, the scholarship students in private schools fare better than their public-school counterparts. You can get your own copy in PDF form by surfing to http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/Press%20Releases/nycchoicerel.htm and following the directions.

Jerry P. Gollub, et al.
National Academy of Science, Committee on Programs for Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in American High Schools
February 2002

Diane Ravitch opined on this National Research Council "study" in last week's Gadfly but it's worth another comment, particularly amidst reports that elite private schools are dropping Advanced Placement courses so as to concentrate on idiosyncratic, teacher-built courses, and in light of last week's report that Harvard will henceforth award credit only to those who score "5" (the top mark) on A.P. exams. In this lengthy study (only the uncorrected, pre-publication version of which is presently available, and that for a stiff price), the National Academy of Science's Committee on Programs for Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in American High Schools essentially tries to impose N.C.T.M. math and a similar view of science on two long-standing, external "gold standard" high school curriculum-and-assessment programs, the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) program and the International Baccalaureate (IB). The gist of the critique is that these programs are too heavy on content coverage and skill development and too light on conceptual understandings. The authors don't see the AP and IB as external tests of important skills and knowledge but, rather, as teaching strategies that, they assert, should be "made consistent with findings from recent research on how people learn". In other words, it's not knowledge of the disciplines that should form the core of these programs, as it long has, but, rather, principles of cognitive psychology and pedagogy. Constructivist principles. AP and IB, in this view, are about the process of learning, not about what's been learned. Probably we should not be surprised, considering that the committee that prepared it was stuffed with educationists, including NCTM heavyweight John Dossey and veteran progressive-educator Jeannie Oakes. This report was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton Administration (jointly by the National Science Foundation and the Education Department's Office of Educational Research and Improvement.) It will be interesting to see whether its recommendations are taken seriously by the private organizations that sponsor the AP and IB programs, and by the Bush administration (whose National Science Foundation recently hired committee member Michael Martinez as a program officer). It seems unlikely that the "research" cited in this report meets the standards of scientific proof mandated in the recent No Child Left Behind act. If you'd like to read the pre-print, surf to http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10129.html for information about obtaining a copy.

Kalman Hettleman.
The Abell Foundation
February 2002

The Baltimore-based Abell Foundation has produced another excellent education report, this one written by Kalman Hettleman and addressing the problems of special education in that city's schools. It's especially timely as the President's Commission on Special Education (which you can read about at http://www.ed.gov/inits/commissionsboards/whspecialeducation/) buckles down to its review of the federal IDEA program with an eye toward the possible reform of same. 50 pages long, Hettleman's report paints a devastating picture of a failed program and goes on to outline a comprehensive overhaul. Because it documents these problems in a real urban setting, it provides a valuable case study of special education in action (or perhaps inaction) and ought to capture the attention of policymakers and special educators alike. You can get a PDF version by surfing to www.abell.org and hunting there. You can also request a hard copy by phoning (410) 547-1300, faxing (410) 539-6579 or emailing [email protected].

Paul Shaker and Elizabeth Heilman
Policy Perspectives, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
January 2002

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) may mean well but it's irrevocably cast in the role of apologist for the nation's ed schools and what goes on in them. This sometimes means striking back at those who find fault with conventional teacher training and certification, with conventional ed-school style research, etc., and savaging those who engage in independent studies that arrive at "outside the ed school box" conclusions. A particularly nasty version of this retribution recently appeared in Policy Perspectives, an AACTE newsletter. There we find a piece called "Advocacy Versus Authority-Silencing the Education Professoriate", by Paul Shaker of California State University at Fresno and Elizabeth E. Heilman of Purdue University. It tries to find fault with numerous critical reports and studies, ranging from A Nation at Risk to the recent report of the National Reading Panel, from Diane Ravitch's book Left Back to CREDO's recent study of the Teach for America Program in Houston to the journal Education Next, and so forth. Its essential argument seems to be that the "critics" haven't a scholarly leg to stand on but are winning the policy fights because the ed school professoriate is too na??ve, quiet and inner-directed to hold its own. It never occurs to Shaker and Heilman that, to the extent that critics are making some headway, it might be due to their compelling evidence, stronger analysis and more cogent argumentation. If you want to see for yourself, you can go to www.edpolicy.org/perspectives/archives/free_issue.htm.