The Education Gadfly Weekly

Robert A. Compton, Adam Raney, and Chad Heeter, producers
2008

Global warming. The war in Iraq. America's diminishing competitive edge. It's hard to say which of these front-page topics incites the most hyperbole among our cultural commentators. But the new documentary 2 Million Minutes tacks some serious points onto the "diminishing competitive edge" column. The film follows six students--two each from the U.S., China, and India--through their daily routines. Neil, from Indiana, works twenty hours a week in a fast food joint and has earned a full-ride scholarship to Purdue without (by his own admission) working very hard in school. He plans to design video games for a living. Brittany plans to go pre-med at Indiana University and watches Grey's Anatomy while studying with her girlfriends. Meanwhile, Apoorva and Rohit, from India, and Xiaoyuan and Ruizhang, from China, spend most of their waking minutes studying and most of their on-camera time telling us about it. The contrast between the American and Asian students is compelling. But it's also manipulative. For one, it ignores far deeper contrasts between the U.S. and Asia, namely the stark social divides (yes, much wider than ours) that will doubtless impede their supposed ascension to the global throne. (See here and here.) The film also ignores economic logic by assuming that trade and innovation are zero-sum games (i.e., what India gains, the U.S. loses). Finally, there's the possibility (glossed over in the documentary) that China's 600,000 engineers won't successfully compete with our 60,000 if their creative urges are stifled by a regimented, test-taking culture. (See here.) Not that we should be complacent. But, like global warming and Iraq, the question of American economic competitiveness is far too complex to be attacked with such an uninformed, one-dimensional analysis. You can find out more about the documentary here.

Education Trust
August 2002

This short (11-page) study by the Education Trust has drawn some media attention because it reaches the kind of conclusion that the press loves: schools serving poor and minority kids are getting gypped when it comes to state and local funding. (See "Neediest Schools Receive Less Money, Report Finds," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Times, August 9, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/09/education/09FUND.html.) The facts, of course, are somewhat more complicated than the headlines. In many jurisdictions, funding formulae-especially those that distribute state dollars-do help compensate for the underlying problem, namely that school systems with lots of poor kids are often in poor communities without much wealth to spend on education. That was the original point of "state equalization" (or "foundation") funding, and often it works. What's distressing to find in these Education Trust data are a number of places-most vividly New York-where the state dollars seem to exacerbate the problem of unequal spending. There are many reasons for this, including the political idiosyncrasies of some state-local relationships. (The Illinois data, for example, are dominated by Chicago's relationship to the state, as Pennsylvania's are by Philadelphia and New York's by New York City.) The big question, though, barely addressed in this report, is whether redirecting more resources into heavily minority and low-income school systems will produce more learning in their classrooms. Of course that depends on how the money gets spent. Across-the-board raises for current staff members aren't likely to yield much by way of improved achievement. Though there are surely cash-starved urban (and rural) school systems, there are others-Newark comes to mind, with its $15,000 per pupil budget-where lots of money is not producing decent educational results for lots of poor and minority youngsters. You can download your very own PDF copy by surfing to http://www.edtrust.org/main/documents/investment.pdf.

Gadfly was still a bit groggy from the holidays when this fine piece about Jonathan Kozol appeared in the Weekly Standard. The article traces Kozol's development, from failed novelist (an excerpt of his book Fume of Poppies: "The white of her belly was lovely and gay. The fire beat at us."), to teacher in an affluent Boston suburb, to Communist sympathizer, to angry old man. It's a sad story, really, about someone who has talents but simply squandered them, preferring to rail against private schools and those many decent people he perceives to be racists than to actually help improve the squalid state of inner-city classrooms. (Others have of course noted this before.) Is he still on that partial hunger-strike, or whatever it was?

"The Learning Disabled Expert," by Jonathan Leaf, Weekly Standard, December 31, 2007

By almost every relevant measure, Massachusetts has the highest-performing public education system in the land, with praiseworthy NAEP results (at least compared to everywhere else), solid academic standards, an effective testing and accountability system, a well-regarded (if puny) charter-school sector, intelligent approaches to teacher licensure, and more. This is fundamentally the legacy of fifteen years of sensible, steadfast (and generously funded) reform efforts that have, for the most part, enjoyed the support of GOP governors (Weld, Romney and more) and Democratic legislators but that have been spearheaded and sustained, above all, by the Commonwealth's bumptious and proudly independent state board of education and former commissioner (now a Fordham board member) David Driscoll.

Why is Governor Deval Patrick bent on ramming through the legislature an organizational and policy upheaval that bids fair to undermine if not actually undo these achievements, while overturning a set-up that dates to Horace Mann's time?

On the surface, the Gov seeks only structural changes, including creation of a powerful education "czar" reporting to him who would sit atop the existing units of education governance, and related changes meant to make those units less autonomous and more subject to gubernatorial direction.

There are, to be sure, some states where Gadfly might hail such changes as what's needed to enable a crusading, change-minded governor to break the grip of the status quo. But Massachusetts is a reform success story, and one doesn't have to be a completely paranoid reader-between-the-lines to see that Governor Patrick is actually bent on undoing or weakening some of those reforms. He signaled as much during his gubernatorial campaign (see here), making known his misgivings about the MCAS accountability system (even as the state board has taken steps to strengthen it) and has made no secret of his unease with the state's charter-school program. He shows many signs of conventional "progressivist" education thinking; of friendship with traditional public-education interest groups (known for their lack of zeal for many of the reforms of recent years); and of unease with the feistier members of the State Board of Education, including several last-minute appointees of Mitt Romney.

So now he's making his move--with exquisitely bad timing, by the way, the State Board having just selected Ohio's Mitch Chester, a champion of standards-based reform (and at least a mild supporter of charters) to succeed Driscoll in the commissioner's seat.

Welcome to the Bay State, Dr. Chester. The Governor is eager to tie your hands and those of the board that hired you.

Massachusetts lawmakers would be idiots to let this happen.

"Massachusetts should preserve independent Board of Education," by Charles Chieppo, Worcester Telegram, January 28, 2008

"Ohio school official picked as new state education commissioner," by Tracy Jan, Boston Globe, January 17, 2008

"Mass testing," by Guy Darst, Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2007

Pioneer Institute testimony about proposed reorganization of the Board of Education

If the charter school movement has learned anything in the last fifteen-plus years, it's that passionate folks with good intentions often underestimate the challenges of starting and leading a school. A recent Salt Lake Tribune article drives this lesson home. It describes how overzealous charter-founders in Utah have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars above market value for their school buildings. Larissa Powell, who was part of a group that paid $500,000 above the appraised price for Lincoln Academy in Pleasant Grove, Utah, said, "Our mistake was we didn't have signed papers saying, before we started... how much it's going to cost." Critics are now wagging their fingers at developers and calling for the state government to step in and regulate. Stephanie Colson, a founder of Eagle Mountain's The Ranches Academy, said, "I wish the state could find a way not to put us at the mercy of the charter developers." Or--instead of asking for government to stick its nose in charter-school business--founders could follow one simple rule: Don't start a school if you don't yet understand facilities and management. Putting up a multi-million-dollar building is no joke. Neither, for that matter, is coordinating food services, hiring employees, or paying bills. The charter movement will take a huge leap forward when charter-starters--and charter school authorizers--recognize this.

"Charter schools in Utah: Building schools, at what price?" by Julia Lyon, Salt Lake Tribune, January 27, 2008

"Welcome to McQualifications." Thus read a Financial Times headline after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that McDonald's--the burger and fries joint--will have the power to bestow upon their employees nationally recognized diplomas (see here).

What led to this? In 2004, Britain appointed businessman Sandy Leitch to draft for Her Majesty's Treasury a report assessing the nation's long-term skills needs--i.e., to evaluate the U.K.'s human capital and determine ways to make the country more globally competitive. Leitch's final report, released in late 2006, offered both a gloomy picture of the skills of Britain's workforce and goals for bettering them. How to act on the recommendations has since become quite a big deal, and quite controversial.

Which is why Brown this week told a London conference, "A generation ago a British prime minister had to worry about the global arms race. Today a British prime minister has to worry about the global skills race." As part of the "global skills race," he noted, three employers (Network Rail, Flybe, and McDonald's) will heretofore be allowed to award nationally accredited qualifications to their employees.

All of which sounds fine until you actually think about what's going on here: the British government is conflating its nation's skills level with its credential level. Allowing McDonald's to develop and award diplomas that will supposedly be the equivalent of GCSE's and A-levels (academic designations) seems rather odd.

First, one wonders whether any of these new qualifications will actually matter to employers outside the golden arches. Author Andrew O'Hagan doubts it. He writes in the Daily Telegraph that such flimsy degrees will hinder rather than help those seeking jobs, as employers ask, "Has he passed any exams or does he just have one of those Mickey Mouse passes from McDonald's?" O'Hagan continues: "As with so many attitudes to social welfare, what is being trumpeted as an increase in choice and opportunity is actually an invitation to participate in a two-tier system." Such a system discriminates between those who have a university degree--which is generally thought to mean something--and those who have from sundry places other degrees, any one of which might mean something or might not.

Second, flooding the market with more paper qualifications won't do much to increase a workforce's actual skills and productivity because simply claiming a worker is skilled doesn't make it so. The government may assume that more workers will undergo supplemental training if they receive palpable credit for it. Such a theory has lots of problems (for example: if diplomas are a dime a dozen, the incentive to get one--and to get more training--actually decreases). And there are questions to be answered: What, exactly, will McDonald's demand of those employees enrolled in the "Basic Shift Managers' course" it's now piloting? How are skills tested and measured? And why, really, does anyone need or deserve to receive a diploma for this? (Similar questions should be asked of Network Rail and Flybe.)

Finally, if skills and job creation is what the U.K. is after, then its best bet would be to concentrate on providing training to its unskilled, welfare-supported groups. (To his credit, Brown has started moving in this direction.) But simply showering papers of dubious or yet-to-be proven worth upon those who are already employed, and believing that more diplomas equals more skills, may not do the trick.

The President wasn't wrong when he said on Monday evening that the No Child Left Behind Act is "succeeding," though he cherry-picked the available evidence to document his claim. Six years in, the best that can be said of NCLB is not that it's causing test scores to soar (some are up a bit) or bad schools to be transformed (most are unchanged) but that it's yielding a trove of data by which we know more than ever before about which schools and kids and states and districts are performing and which aren't, which are getting better and which aren't. Sunshine is finally breaking through the swirling clouds of educator claims, denials, and obfuscation.

That sunshine is still patchy, to be sure. Flawed state standards, incompatible tests, a screwy federal definition of progress, and a fair amount of game-playing and finagling continue to make it far harder than it should be to know how American K-12 education is doing. But we know more today than we did yesterday and we could know still more tomorrow. Indeed, the most important single repair that Washington could make to NCLB would be straightening out the measurement-and-reporting system. For at day's end, turning around schools, improving curriculum, strengthening teaching, and getting kids to learn more can't be micromanaged from the shores of the Potomac. It's the proper work of parents and communities. Uncle Sam can best help by getting the standards, tests and reporting arrangements right so that everyone has solid information about their schools, then getting out of the way.

With one exception that the President nailed: we know from painful experience that states and communities, left to their own devices, mostly do a crummy job of giving poor kids exit visas from bad schools and entry visas to better ones. Though perhaps a third of U.S. families are exercising school choice today, by and large those are families with the means to change homes or write tuition checks. Millions of low-income children remain trapped in bad schools, mainly in big cities. Perhaps the greatest disappointment of NCLB is the failure of its "public school choice" program to create viable educational options for large numbers of those youngsters.

No, Mr. Bush didn't say that. He didn't explicitly acknowledge the weak spots in NCLB. But he offered a powerfully good idea for helping kids in urgent educational need: scholarships to cover the costs of attending other public and private schools. Pell Grants for Kids, he called them, because they're modeled on the well-known program of need-based grants for college students. He asked for $300 million to pay for them. No, that's no huge program by federal standards. At, say, $5,000 per kid, it would cover 60,000 scholarships at a time. (For perspective, the current D.C. voucher program benefits about 2400 youngsters; Milwaukee's voucher program assists 17,000+ kids at about $6,000 apiece.) But it would be a hugely important precedent as well as an obvious educational boon for those lucky girls and boys. Predictably, the usual suspects hate it and the Wall Street Journal loves it.

Note that the Bush plan would cover public as well as private school tuitions. Though a number of states have created open-enrollment plans whereby any child can attend any public school in the state (space permitting) without paying, in far too many states a youngster seeking to enroll in public school in a district other than his/her district of residence must pay tuition to do so--tuitions that typically exceed those of Catholic parochial schools. That's a lousy way to run a public education system but so long as such tuition barriers persist they deter poor kids from accessing better public schools. Hence the need for financial aid.

As White House aides know, Pell Grants for Kids isn't a new idea. Senators Bob Packwood and Pat Moynihan proposed something almost identical in 1979. In 1992, the President's father, advised by Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and Assistant Secretary Diane Ravitch, proposed a "G.I. Bill for Kids" along similar lines (see here). (Ravitch also testified in 1999 for the use of Pell Grants for k-12 kids.) As U.S. Senator, Alexander has revived the proposal on several occasions.

To date, Congress has scorned this very good idea. Odds are that will happen again with the President's new plan--and that will be a pity indeed. For the greatest shame of American education is our inability to help poor kids flee dreadful schools for better ones--a shame we now know more about than ever before, thanks to NCLB.

This article originally ran in slightly different form on January 30th in National Review Online.

Rumors that New York's state assessments are getting easier in the era of No Child Left Behind have repeatedly surfaced (see here and here). A close look at this National Center on Education Statistics report from last June indicates that proficiency "cut scores" there may have in fact dropped from 2003 to 2005 (at least in fourth-grade and eighth-grade math and reading)--explaining in part the Empire State's big test-score increases over those years. Now comes more evidence from an intrepid New York City parent (and former teacher) that a high-school mathematics test has gotten dramatically easier over the previous decade. According to Steve Koss's analysis, out of the test's 30 multiple-choice questions, a student now only has to get 13 right in order to "pass" the test. That's many fewer right answers than a student in the 1990s would have had to earn. Of course, it's possible that the questions themselves got harder--possible but not likely. At the risk of repeating ourselves: the whole testing enterprise needs a whole lot more transparency and consistency if standards-based reform is to stay afloat.

"NY State Math A Regents Exams - The Soft Bigotry (and Political Payoff) of Lowered Expectations," by Steve Koss, NYC Public School Parents Blog, January 24, 2008

Robert A. Compton, Adam Raney, and Chad Heeter, producers
2008

Global warming. The war in Iraq. America's diminishing competitive edge. It's hard to say which of these front-page topics incites the most hyperbole among our cultural commentators. But the new documentary 2 Million Minutes tacks some serious points onto the "diminishing competitive edge" column. The film follows six students--two each from the U.S., China, and India--through their daily routines. Neil, from Indiana, works twenty hours a week in a fast food joint and has earned a full-ride scholarship to Purdue without (by his own admission) working very hard in school. He plans to design video games for a living. Brittany plans to go pre-med at Indiana University and watches Grey's Anatomy while studying with her girlfriends. Meanwhile, Apoorva and Rohit, from India, and Xiaoyuan and Ruizhang, from China, spend most of their waking minutes studying and most of their on-camera time telling us about it. The contrast between the American and Asian students is compelling. But it's also manipulative. For one, it ignores far deeper contrasts between the U.S. and Asia, namely the stark social divides (yes, much wider than ours) that will doubtless impede their supposed ascension to the global throne. (See here and here.) The film also ignores economic logic by assuming that trade and innovation are zero-sum games (i.e., what India gains, the U.S. loses). Finally, there's the possibility (glossed over in the documentary) that China's 600,000 engineers won't successfully compete with our 60,000 if their creative urges are stifled by a regimented, test-taking culture. (See here.) Not that we should be complacent. But, like global warming and Iraq, the question of American economic competitiveness is far too complex to be attacked with such an uninformed, one-dimensional analysis. You can find out more about the documentary here.

Education Trust
August 2002

This short (11-page) study by the Education Trust has drawn some media attention because it reaches the kind of conclusion that the press loves: schools serving poor and minority kids are getting gypped when it comes to state and local funding. (See "Neediest Schools Receive Less Money, Report Finds," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Times, August 9, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/09/education/09FUND.html.) The facts, of course, are somewhat more complicated than the headlines. In many jurisdictions, funding formulae-especially those that distribute state dollars-do help compensate for the underlying problem, namely that school systems with lots of poor kids are often in poor communities without much wealth to spend on education. That was the original point of "state equalization" (or "foundation") funding, and often it works. What's distressing to find in these Education Trust data are a number of places-most vividly New York-where the state dollars seem to exacerbate the problem of unequal spending. There are many reasons for this, including the political idiosyncrasies of some state-local relationships. (The Illinois data, for example, are dominated by Chicago's relationship to the state, as Pennsylvania's are by Philadelphia and New York's by New York City.) The big question, though, barely addressed in this report, is whether redirecting more resources into heavily minority and low-income school systems will produce more learning in their classrooms. Of course that depends on how the money gets spent. Across-the-board raises for current staff members aren't likely to yield much by way of improved achievement. Though there are surely cash-starved urban (and rural) school systems, there are others-Newark comes to mind, with its $15,000 per pupil budget-where lots of money is not producing decent educational results for lots of poor and minority youngsters. You can download your very own PDF copy by surfing to http://www.edtrust.org/main/documents/investment.pdf.