The Education Gadfly Weekly

David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson, Susan M. Kardos, Edward Liu and Heather G. Peske, Teachers College Record
2002

In an intriguing article in the December 2001 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Harvard ed school professor Susan Moore Johnson and four colleagues explored the so-called "generation gap" between new teachers and those who have spent their professional lives in classrooms. Analyzing the results of interviews with 50 first- and second-year teachers in Massachusetts, the researchers found that newer teachers hold dramatically different views of their profession and expectations for their own careers than do classroom veterans. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=79#1220.) Now Johnson and team have culled another set of observations from those interviews. New teachers, they find, feel "lost at sea" when it comes to their experiences with curricula, state standards and high-stakes testing. Even in states with well developed systems of standards and accountability, fledgling teachers-whose hands are full with such tasks as learning to maintain discipline and navigate school bureaucracy-report that they were not given detailed curricula to help them determine what to teach, how, and when. Rather, testing objectives serve as "proxies" for substantive curricula in many schools and districts. The result is that many new teachers scramble to cobble together lesson plans from one day to the next without coherence or clear understanding of which topics are intellectually most important. Moore and colleagues say their research has several implications. At the state level, policymakers must insist that schools and districts fully align their curricula with state standards. At the school level, principals should maximize novices' effectiveness by encouraging collaboration between them and veterans in creating curricula. And, of course, more R&D is needed to develop and identify the most effective curricula. You can read an executive summary of this report at http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=10822 (requires free registration). For more information on the work of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, visit http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ngt/ or email [email protected].

Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg, American Educational Research Association
April 2002

In this 33-page paper prepared for last month's American Educational Research Association meeting, Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg of the Philadelphia school system examine the differential effects on that city's school children of no kindergarten, half-day kindergarten and full-day kindergarten. Their findings: kindergarten helps urban kids stay on grade level and avoid retention, and the full-day version is more powerful than the half-day kind. Moreover, in their view, it's cost-effective, because the savings that it yields (via reduced grade retention, etc.) help offset the cost of providing it. You can get a copy by calling 215-299-7770.

Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, RAND
2002

In this 222-page book, three members of RAND's education research team (Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly, Sheila Nataraj Kirby) summarize the findings from seventeen RAND studies of New American Schools (NAS), its school designs, and comprehensive school reform in general. It's a fine piece of work that probes the difficulty and complexity of the "comprehensive school reform" idea, the immense challenges of implementing it, the unreadiness of many of the NAS designs, the risks of "scaling up," the resistance to change among schools and school systems, the mixed results so far in terms of student achievement, and the inadequacy of typical outcome measures when it comes to capturing all this. Perhaps the most sobering line in the book: "Externally developed education reform interventions cannot be 'break the mold' and still be marketable and implementable in current district and school contexts." This volume is worth your while. The ISBN is 0833031333. You can obtain a copy for $28 or download each chapter in PDF form at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1498.

New American Schools
2002

New American Schools (formerly New American Schools Development Corporation) recently released this 12-page self-study and self-promotion document which asserts-perhaps to nobody's surprise-that what they're doing is pretty terrific and what they're going to do in the future is better still. It stresses that NAS is about changing systems, not just constructing and disseminating school designs. And it summarizes some of NAS's new directions under the dynamic leadership of Mary Anne Schmitt. You can view a PDF at http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/policy.pdf. Also newly released by NAS is a trio of reports on Memphis, where that organization had made a large investment in education reform and where the former superintendent had made a large commitment to installing NAS designs in her city's schools. Her successor, however, opted to discard the NAS (and other "comprehensive school reform" or CSR) designs, claiming (on the basis of an internal study) that they weren't producing solid achievement results. NAS is now responding. The newest of these papers, by Tennessee State University professor James McLean, faults the methodology of the Memphis self-study and says that other studies showed solid results from that city's CSR effort. NAS has made two of those other studies available, both directed by Stephen Ross of the University of Memphis. (Somebody was in a hurry to get these out; he's "Stephen Ross, Ph.D." on one and "Steven M. Ross" on the other.) I don't know the truth about Memphis, and I have some misgivings about CSR as a reform strategy, but anyone tracking this topic will likely want to delve into the particulars of this forceful effort by NAS to show that it really was succeeding in Memphis and that Memphis was wrong to throw it out. For more, see "A Review of Evaluation of the Comprehensive School Reform Models in the Memphis City Schools" by James McLean, August 2001, http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/Memphis%20McLean.pdf; "Using Comprehensive School Reform Models to Raise Achievement: Factors Associated with Success in Memphis Schools," by Stephen Ross, January 14, 2001, http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/Ross%20Using%20Comprehensive%20School%20Reform%20Models.pdf; "Fourth-Year Achievement Results on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System for Restructuring Schools in Memphis," by Steven Ross et al, April 2001, http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/Ross%20TVAAS.pdf. You may also want to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with an October 2001 Fordham report titled "New American Schools: From Revolution to Mainstream," by Jeffrey Mirel (http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=44).

Paul Barton, Educational Testing Service
April 2002

Paul Barton of the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center is a thoughtful, persistent fellow. In this 22-page paper, he argues (with some courage for an ETS person!) that education reform in America has gone overboard on testing and isn't using the right kinds of tests. He presses for a broader definition of reform, one that pays closer heed to curriculum and instruction as well as assessment-and also for improved testing, especially for distinguishing between the kind used for accountability purposes and the kind that helps teachers improve their classroom performance. You can download the report or order a hard copy for $10.50 at http://www.ets.org/research/pic.

Carol F. Stoel and Tin-Swe Thant, Council for Basic Education
March 18, 2002

Is it easy to recruit and retain good teachers in other countries? How competitive are the rewards of teaching around the globe? Are teachers abroad paid more for teaching subjects in which there is a shortage of qualified teachers? These are just some of the questions that this insightful survey-produced by the Council for Basic Education with support from the Milken Family Foundation-hopes to answer. The survey grows out of the work of the Council for Basic Education's Schools Around the World (SAW) program, a partnership of nine countries (France, Portugal, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, Japan, Germany and the US). The bottom line of "Teachers' Professional Lives" is that U.S. policy makers and educators can learn a lot about effective ways to train and maintain good teachers by studying what happens in other lands. Some highlights:

• Teachers are rarely held accountable for student achievement (the US and the UK are exceptions).
• Teachers in most countries are paid less (in some instances much less) than professionals in other fields requiring similar academic credentials. The obvious exception is Japan. The authors note there may be a correlation between how Japanese teachers are treated and the country's high level of academic achievement.
• Japan's teachers are among the top five percent of high school graduates who successfully pass the country's national university entrance exam, as well as a highly competitive pre-service exam.
• Japan is required by law to provide in-service training for teachers. Professional development activities occur year-round.
• A majority of U.S. teachers spend less than eight hours per year in professional development.
• Most countries in the survey face "acute shortages" of math and science teachers.
• In these countries, teachers are generally tenured and permanently employed after a probationary period of one to three years. Tenured teachers can rarely be dismissed for incompetence or for poor performance evaluations. As a result, teaching is usually seen as a life-long career.
  

To learn more, download the report as a PDF file at http://www.c-b-e.org/PDF/TeachersLife.pdf.

The debate swirling around renewal of the major federal law addressing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), draws much of its energy from a widely shared but probably false premise: that schools are increasingly swamped with disabled children who are diverting scarce resources away from other students. Both the education establishment and IDEA reformers tend to accept this premise although they draw different conclusions from it. The establishment wants the federal government to cover the costs of special education more fully so that, as they see it, public schools will finally have the wherewithal to deliver on the promise of improving the achievement of non-disabled students. Cost-conscious reformers, on the other hand, want the costs of special education contained, figuring that money devoted to general education is likely to yield better results than money devoted to special education.

But what makes everyone think the schools are being inundated by more and more children with learning problems? It's true that the proportion of children in special education has increased significantly since the mid-1970s, when IDEA began. The percentage of K-12 students identified as needing special education rose from 8.3% in 1976-7 to 11.8% in 1998-9. But an increase in the percentage of students identified as needing special education does not necessarily mean that there has been an increase in the percentage of students with disabilities, any more than an increase in reports of domestic violence necessarily means there is more domestic violence. Trends in these statistics are sensitive to reporting biases and shifting definitions.

A close examination of different categories of special education enrollments suggests that, while the identification of special education students has increased, the actual number of disabled youngsters has remained approximately steady. Almost the entire increase in special education enrollments since 1976 can be attributed to a rise in one category, called "specific learning disability," which has more than tripled from 1.8% of the student population in 1976-7 to 6.0% in 1998-9. All other categories of special education combined, including mental retardation, serious emotional disturbance, deafness, blindness, autism, and head injury, have actually declined from 6.5% to 5.8% of the student population during the same period. (See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/digest/dt053.html.)

If a general increase were truly underway in the proportion of students with learning problems, then it should be evident in more than just one category of special education. It is highly implausible that something has caused there to be more children in one disability category without also causing more mental retardation, serious emotional disturbance, etc. It is more likely that the large increase in the category of specific learning disabilities can be attributed to a greater likelihood of diagnosing children with those problems than to a true increase in the incidence of those learning problems (and only those learning problems) in the student population.

This seems especially likely when we recognize that this high-growth category, specific learning disability, consists of learning problems that are more subjective in their diagnosis and less expensive in their treatment than other categories of special education. The relative subjectivity of identifying specific learning disabilities makes it possible for changes in the number of children with that diagnosis to be caused by an increase in the propensity to assign that label. The relatively low cost of treating specific learning disabilities may further incline schools and educators to assign that label, especially if the additional funds produced by identifying a child with a specific learning disability exceed the marginal cost of providing that student with relatively minimal services.

Whether or not schools make a "profit" off these children, they may face other incentives to identify students in this way. They may be more willing to diagnose students with specific learning disabilities so as to exempt them from accountability testing, to reduce expectations about their academic performance, to solve behavior problems in "regular" classrooms, to get additional help to a child who is struggling academically (whether disabled or not), or in response to parental requests for special treatment. And, of course, one cannot rule out the possibility that schools have increased their rate of diagnosing specific learning disabilities because they have become better informed about such disorders and are more adept at recognizing them.

The malleability of the "specific learning disability" diagnosis is underscored by the odd way in which those disorders are identified. To be diagnosed as having a specific learning disability, students must perform significantly worse in a subject area, like math or reading, than is indicated by their cognitive potential, as typically measured by an IQ score. But this mismatch between potential and achievement is not always caused by a "disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written language," as the official definition of the disorder requires. It could also result from exposure to ineffective teaching methods. Schools may not be receiving more students with learning problems; in an era of results-based accountability, they may simply be more likely to identify students who have been the victims of educational malpractice.

Whatever the causes of the increase in children diagnosed with specific learning disabilities, it is extremely unlikely that non-school factors are producing more children afflicted with such disabilities while producing no increase in all other categories of disability combined. But this is not how defenders of the education status quo see it. They persist in arguing that schools are being drowned by a tidal wave of children with learning problems caused by forces outside the school system.

Consider the arguments advanced by Sheldon Berman, Perry Davis, Ann Koufman-Frederick, and David Urion in their chapter in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, a volume on special education released a year ago by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Progressive Policy Institute (http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/special_ed_final.pdf). The authors are convinced that "the increases [in special education that] schools have been experiencing have not been caused by school district policy and practice." Instead, they insist, "these cost increases have been primarily due to the increased numbers of children with more significant special needs who require more costly services." In particular, they identify three non-school phenomena that, they say, have increased the numbers of children with learning problems: improvements in medical technology, de-institutionalization of children with serious difficulties, and increases in childhood poverty.

All these putative causes have an air of plausibility to them but all also turn out to be inconsistent with the broader facts. It's true that improvements in medical technology have saved the lives of more low birth-weight babies and others with health problems, leading to an increase in children who manifest learning problems later in life. But improvements in medical technology and other improvements in public health, such as reductions in lead paint and safer car seats, have also helped prevent some children from developing disabilities at all, or have reduced the severity of those problems. Improvements in medical care and public health would thus lead to a net reduction in the number of children with learning difficulties.

Berman et al. contend that increasing numbers of surviving low-birth-weight babies resulted in an estimated increase in children expected to have mental retardation from 4,550 between 1980 and 1985 to 12,375 between 1995 and the present. However, the overall number of mentally retarded children in schools actually declined from 961,000 in 1976-7 to 597,000 in 1998-9.

Obviously, low birth-weight babies contribute only a small amount to the total number of children with mental retardation. But it appears that the increase in mental retardation attributable to medical technology saving low birth-weight babies has been more than offset by a significant reduction in the number of mentally retarded children, a reduction attributable to other improvements in medical care and public health.

Berman and colleagues' claims about de-institutionalization and childhood poverty are no less misleading. While they provide no numbers, they contend that the de-institutionalization of mentally retarded children in particular has placed a growing burden on school systems. Yet, as we have already seen, the total number of mentally retarded children served by schools under IDEA has steeply declined. Children with specific problems in math or reading were never institutionalized, so de-institutionalization cannot explain the rise in the one category of special education that has grown.

Nor is childhood poverty a plausible explanation for the increase in specific learning disabilities. First, the federal government's definition of specific learning disabilities explicitly excludes learning problems that result from economic disadvantage: "The term does not include children who have learning problems which are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage." (See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs99/digest98/appendix-3.html#h under "Handicapped.") Second, poverty among children under age 6 is actually about the same now (16.9% in 2000) as it was when IDEA began (17.7% in 1976). (See http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov20.html.) It's true that, during the intervening years, including recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s, childhood poverty percentages were sometimes higher, but this particular measure of poverty can be misleading because it excludes non-cash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps. Those governmental programs act as a cushion (albeit an imperfect one) to reduce basic material deprivation for children during economic slowdowns.

Poverty comparisons over time are also complicated by the shifting goal post of the poverty line. The larger reality is that, as our GDP grows over time, America is becoming a wealthier society, and this is true for those at the lower end of the income scale as well as (if not as dramatically as) those at the upper end. In 1976, the average family in the lowest quintile of income earned $12,696 (in 2000 dollars) compared to $14,232 for the average bottom-quintile family in 2000. (See http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f03.html.) Economic deprivation is simply not a plausible explanation for a tripling in the percentage of children with specific learning disabilities-and only children in that category-especially when the definition of the disorder explicitly excludes economic causes.

If I am correct that there has been no large secular increase in the true incidence of learning problems since the mid-1970s, but rather an increase in the identification of students with those problems, several important policy conclusions follow.

First, money devoted to special education should not be viewed as money taken away from the general education of students. Schools have simply shifted more students who previously would have been in general education into special education. Whether schools were previously under-diagnosing or are currently over-diagnosing, the basic fact is that schools have been given additional money over time to educate a population of students with the same spectrum of learning problems that they used to have.

If non-school factors have not stuck schools with more disabled students, then we would expect schools to have produced better outcomes with the additional resources. They have not. Over the last four decades, per pupil spending in real dollars has increased from $2,360 to $7,086. Yet student outcomes, as measured by the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress and high school graduation rates, have been relatively flat. (See endnote 27 in http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm.) Whatever the causes for this productivity crisis in education (spending more without improving outcomes), it is not reasonable to blame special education for consuming extra dollars or burdening schools with more difficult to educate students. Schools have more money to educate the same distribution of students that they used to have. Shifting students and money into the special education category does not alter this basic fact.

Second, if the federal government were more fully to compensate schools for the costs of the IDEA mandates, we should expect a further increase in the shifting of students into the special education category. The additional outside funds that learning disabled students bring to a school may already play a role in the tripling of students with that diagnosis.

As with Medicare and Medicaid, policymakers need to balance the desire to cover necessary costs with the need to prevent abuse of the special-education program. Improvements in the diagnosis system could take several forms. Washington might institute a system of spot-check auditing of diagnoses. Perhaps diagnostic patterns in schools can be compared against demographic profiles to identify schools that appear to be over or under-diagnosing specific disorders. These might be subject to closer review.

But the most powerful reform would "voucherize" all students who receive a special-education diagnosis. This is actually happening in Florida under the McKay Scholarship program, whereby disabled youngsters may take the money allocated for their education to private schools if they wish. Making all special education students eligible for vouchers not only expands the options available to them and their families, it also provides a disincentive to public schools to over-diagnose students, since public schools will not want to lose these students to private schools. (Any resulting problem of under-diagnosis could be handled through a state-level appeal system or, as today, through the legal system.)

Much is wrong with American special education today. But one thing is not wrong: schools are not suffering under the burden of a growing population of children with special needs. The evidence suggests that schools have the same distribution of students with learning difficulties that they used to have. Any reforms considered as part of IDEA renewal should take this fact into account.

"The Rising Costs of Special Education in Massachusetts," by Sheldon Berman, Perry Davis, Ann Koufman-Frederick and David Urion, from Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, May 2001. To read other chapters in the volume, see http://www.edexcellence.net/library/special_ed/index.html.

Jay P. Greene is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

The U.S. Department of Education released the results of the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in history today, and while the scores of fourth and eighth graders have modestly improved since 1994, the scores of twelfth graders were frustratingly low and showed no improvement. In twelfth grade, 57 percent of students still fall "below basic." In no other subject assessed by NAEP do more than half of high school seniors register below basic, noted historian Diane Ravitch, who spoke at a news conference organized by the Department. "Such poor results in U.S. history are cause for additional alarm at a time when the United States is under terrorist threat," she remarked. "Our ability to defend-intelligently and thoughtfully-what we as a nation hold dear depends on our knowledge and understanding of what we hold dear. That can only be achieved through learning the history we share, and clearly far too many high school seniors have not learned even a modest part of it." For more about the NAEP results, go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard.

Teachers who are certified as outstanding by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) are awarded large salary increases in many states and districts, but some researchers have questioned whether the NBPTS is accurately identifying the most effective teachers with its complex and expensive procedures. New research suggests that NBPTS-certified teachers are not making exceptional contributions to student learning in Tennessee, where the accountability system uses sophisticated methods to calculate the annual achievement gains of the students of every teacher in grades 3 through 8. In "The Value-Added Achievement Gains of NBPTS-Certified Teachers in Tennessee," J.E. Stone of the College of Education at East Tennessee State University examines the annual student achievement gains produced by the 16 NBPTS-certified teachers who teach in grades 3 through 8 in Tennessee, and who therefore have value-added score reports in the state's database. He finds that only 18 percent of the NBPTS-certified teachers' value-added scores reach the level of exemplary, which the state defines as bringing about an improvement in student achievement equal to 115 percent of one typical year's academic growth in the local school system. On the other hand, 13 percent of the NBPTS-certified teachers' scores would be considered deficient, which the state defines as bringing about a gain of less than 85 percent of a year's growth. None of the 16 teachers meets the standard for high-performing teaching established by a new bonus pay program in Chattanooga, which requires teachers to produce a gain of 115 percent of a year's growth in three core subjects for three consecutive years. For details, surf to http://www.education-consumers.com/briefs/stoneNBPTS.shtm

Why have school boards at all? asked Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt in a provocative op-ed this week. We don't elect our city police chief or our county health commissioner, yet nobody sees this as a denial of democracy. Why not let our elected mayors and city or county councils-the people who make the budgets-take similar responsibility for public schools? Hiatt quotes Michael Usdan, who argues that today's separation of school boards from the rest of local government impedes the cooperation needed to deal with complex, diverse populations in cities and inner suburbs. After recounting the antics of some dysfunctional school boards, Hiatt describes efforts of mayors, governors, and legislatures to take control of troubled school systems in some urban areas, but reminds us that the challenges facing these schools are enormous and will not be solved merely by reshuffling the folks at the top. He remains hopeful, however, that boards appointed by political leaders "can deliver something that was beyond the capacity of the elected panels they're replacing: a qualified superintendent who sticks around for a while and a school board that lets the superintendent do his or her job. Such stability isn't sufficient to guarantee progress, but it certainly is a prerequisite." See "What's so sacred about a school board?" by Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post, May 6, 2002.

Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg, American Educational Research Association
April 2002

In this 33-page paper prepared for last month's American Educational Research Association meeting, Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg of the Philadelphia school system examine the differential effects on that city's school children of no kindergarten, half-day kindergarten and full-day kindergarten. Their findings: kindergarten helps urban kids stay on grade level and avoid retention, and the full-day version is more powerful than the half-day kind. Moreover, in their view, it's cost-effective, because the savings that it yields (via reduced grade retention, etc.) help offset the cost of providing it. You can get a copy by calling 215-299-7770.

Carol F. Stoel and Tin-Swe Thant, Council for Basic Education
March 18, 2002

Is it easy to recruit and retain good teachers in other countries? How competitive are the rewards of teaching around the globe? Are teachers abroad paid more for teaching subjects in which there is a shortage of qualified teachers? These are just some of the questions that this insightful survey-produced by the Council for Basic Education with support from the Milken Family Foundation-hopes to answer. The survey grows out of the work of the Council for Basic Education's Schools Around the World (SAW) program, a partnership of nine countries (France, Portugal, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, Japan, Germany and the US). The bottom line of "Teachers' Professional Lives" is that U.S. policy makers and educators can learn a lot about effective ways to train and maintain good teachers by studying what happens in other lands. Some highlights:

• Teachers are rarely held accountable for student achievement (the US and the UK are exceptions).
• Teachers in most countries are paid less (in some instances much less) than professionals in other fields requiring similar academic credentials. The obvious exception is Japan. The authors note there may be a correlation between how Japanese teachers are treated and the country's high level of academic achievement.
• Japan's teachers are among the top five percent of high school graduates who successfully pass the country's national university entrance exam, as well as a highly competitive pre-service exam.
• Japan is required by law to provide in-service training for teachers. Professional development activities occur year-round.
• A majority of U.S. teachers spend less than eight hours per year in professional development.
• Most countries in the survey face "acute shortages" of math and science teachers.
• In these countries, teachers are generally tenured and permanently employed after a probationary period of one to three years. Tenured teachers can rarely be dismissed for incompetence or for poor performance evaluations. As a result, teaching is usually seen as a life-long career.
  

To learn more, download the report as a PDF file at http://www.c-b-e.org/PDF/TeachersLife.pdf.

David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson, Susan M. Kardos, Edward Liu and Heather G. Peske, Teachers College Record
2002

In an intriguing article in the December 2001 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Harvard ed school professor Susan Moore Johnson and four colleagues explored the so-called "generation gap" between new teachers and those who have spent their professional lives in classrooms. Analyzing the results of interviews with 50 first- and second-year teachers in Massachusetts, the researchers found that newer teachers hold dramatically different views of their profession and expectations for their own careers than do classroom veterans. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=79#1220.) Now Johnson and team have culled another set of observations from those interviews. New teachers, they find, feel "lost at sea" when it comes to their experiences with curricula, state standards and high-stakes testing. Even in states with well developed systems of standards and accountability, fledgling teachers-whose hands are full with such tasks as learning to maintain discipline and navigate school bureaucracy-report that they were not given detailed curricula to help them determine what to teach, how, and when. Rather, testing objectives serve as "proxies" for substantive curricula in many schools and districts. The result is that many new teachers scramble to cobble together lesson plans from one day to the next without coherence or clear understanding of which topics are intellectually most important. Moore and colleagues say their research has several implications. At the state level, policymakers must insist that schools and districts fully align their curricula with state standards. At the school level, principals should maximize novices' effectiveness by encouraging collaboration between them and veterans in creating curricula. And, of course, more R&D is needed to develop and identify the most effective curricula. You can read an executive summary of this report at http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=10822 (requires free registration). For more information on the work of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, visit http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ngt/ or email [email protected].

Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, RAND
2002

In this 222-page book, three members of RAND's education research team (Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly, Sheila Nataraj Kirby) summarize the findings from seventeen RAND studies of New American Schools (NAS), its school designs, and comprehensive school reform in general. It's a fine piece of work that probes the difficulty and complexity of the "comprehensive school reform" idea, the immense challenges of implementing it, the unreadiness of many of the NAS designs, the risks of "scaling up," the resistance to change among schools and school systems, the mixed results so far in terms of student achievement, and the inadequacy of typical outcome measures when it comes to capturing all this. Perhaps the most sobering line in the book: "Externally developed education reform interventions cannot be 'break the mold' and still be marketable and implementable in current district and school contexts." This volume is worth your while. The ISBN is 0833031333. You can obtain a copy for $28 or download each chapter in PDF form at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1498.

New American Schools
2002

New American Schools (formerly New American Schools Development Corporation) recently released this 12-page self-study and self-promotion document which asserts-perhaps to nobody's surprise-that what they're doing is pretty terrific and what they're going to do in the future is better still. It stresses that NAS is about changing systems, not just constructing and disseminating school designs. And it summarizes some of NAS's new directions under the dynamic leadership of Mary Anne Schmitt. You can view a PDF at http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/policy.pdf. Also newly released by NAS is a trio of reports on Memphis, where that organization had made a large investment in education reform and where the former superintendent had made a large commitment to installing NAS designs in her city's schools. Her successor, however, opted to discard the NAS (and other "comprehensive school reform" or CSR) designs, claiming (on the basis of an internal study) that they weren't producing solid achievement results. NAS is now responding. The newest of these papers, by Tennessee State University professor James McLean, faults the methodology of the Memphis self-study and says that other studies showed solid results from that city's CSR effort. NAS has made two of those other studies available, both directed by Stephen Ross of the University of Memphis. (Somebody was in a hurry to get these out; he's "Stephen Ross, Ph.D." on one and "Steven M. Ross" on the other.) I don't know the truth about Memphis, and I have some misgivings about CSR as a reform strategy, but anyone tracking this topic will likely want to delve into the particulars of this forceful effort by NAS to show that it really was succeeding in Memphis and that Memphis was wrong to throw it out. For more, see "A Review of Evaluation of the Comprehensive School Reform Models in the Memphis City Schools" by James McLean, August 2001, http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/Memphis%20McLean.pdf; "Using Comprehensive School Reform Models to Raise Achievement: Factors Associated with Success in Memphis Schools," by Stephen Ross, January 14, 2001, http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/Ross%20Using%20Comprehensive%20School%20Reform%20Models.pdf; "Fourth-Year Achievement Results on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System for Restructuring Schools in Memphis," by Steven Ross et al, April 2001, http://www.naschools.org/uploadedfiles/Ross%20TVAAS.pdf. You may also want to acquaint (or reacquaint) yourself with an October 2001 Fordham report titled "New American Schools: From Revolution to Mainstream," by Jeffrey Mirel (http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=44).

Paul Barton, Educational Testing Service
April 2002

Paul Barton of the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center is a thoughtful, persistent fellow. In this 22-page paper, he argues (with some courage for an ETS person!) that education reform in America has gone overboard on testing and isn't using the right kinds of tests. He presses for a broader definition of reform, one that pays closer heed to curriculum and instruction as well as assessment-and also for improved testing, especially for distinguishing between the kind used for accountability purposes and the kind that helps teachers improve their classroom performance. You can download the report or order a hard copy for $10.50 at http://www.ets.org/research/pic.