The Education Gadfly Weekly

National Center for Education Statistics June 2004

The National Center for Education Statistics is doing a markedly better job these days of gathering, analyzing and reporting data than of "getting the word out" about what you can learn from it. I don't know why it and the Education Department are so muted about so many first-rate statistical products. One surmises it's a consequence of submerging NCES in the new Institute of Education Sciences, which seems interested only in research and evaluation, not data, though the latter are generally more informative and unimpeachable. In any case, we have here another strong and illuminating (if tardy) report, based on the first installment of an important longitudinal study that began with the kindergarten class of 1998-99. The essence of this 68-page report is conveyed in a four-page concluding chapter, which says, among other things, that:

• Fifty-six percent of all U.S. kindergarteners are in full-day programs while the remainder attends for a half-day.
• Full-day programs are most often found in the South, least often in the Northeast, and more often in Catholic than public (or other private) schools.
• Poor and minority children are more apt to be in full-day programs than affluent and white youngsters.
• The instructional program is (proportionately) similar in full and half-day kindergarten programs, including nearly ubiquitous daily work on reading and language arts.
• "The children enrolled in a full-day program make greater gains in reading language arts over the course of the kindergarten year compared to those in half-day classes. The differences . . . are not only apparent when simple comparisons of gains are made, they persist when the comparisons of gains take into account other influential child and class characteristics."

If you'd like to see for yourself, it's publication NCES 2004-078 and you can find it on the web here. 

U.S. Department of Education May 2004

This publication is a revision of an earlier teachers' guide to the No Child Left Behind Act. It starts with an overview of the law and a long explanation of its controversial "Highly Qualified Teacher" requirements. The authors put much effort into clearing up teachers' misconceptions via numerous "Myth vs. Reality" subsections, and they include information on resources and rewards available to teachers under NCLB. The report closes with a chart-style comparison of federal, state, and local responsibilities under NCLB, and an overview of some state and local initiatives to promote teacher quality through professional development, recruitment, and retention. There is also additional information for ESL and special ed teachers. You can find by clicking here.  

In 1994, the Lake View (AR) school district - a tiny, rural district with declining enrollment and a high proportion of poor and minority students - sued Arkansas, arguing that the state's system of education finance was inequitable. (See Eric Hanushek's "Who could be against 'adequate' school funding?", for more on the foolishness of such lawsuits.) The courts sided with the district and ordered the legislature to make the per-pupil spending in the Natural State more equitable; that is, to make spending levels in poor, rural districts closer to those of wealthier districts. In response, legislators determined that all districts would spend at least $4,300 per pupil and the state would contribute as much money as needed for all districts to meet that amount. Too low, Lake View argued, and after two additional lawsuits, in 2002 the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered the legislature to undertake an "adequacy" study to determine how much money is required to provide an adequate education to all students. At the time, Attorney General Mark Pryor expressed "grave concerns" about the adequacy ruling, arguing that "what we'll see here in the state of Arkansas is mass consolidation [of school districts] and also a great increase in taxation." This week, Pryor's predictions came true: Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee struck a deal with the legislature to hike sales and services taxes to boost school spending while consolidating any district with fewer than 350 students - including Lake View - with a larger neighboring district. Now, of course, several small districts, Lake View among them, have filed suit to stop the consolidation, arguing, as Professor Martin Schoppmeyer of the University of Arkansas said, "that consolidation runs counter to educational research that children learn better in smaller schools." Of course, even the Arkansas Education Association admits that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. AEA president Sid Johnson has embraced the consolidation plan, saying that it would serve the greater good by giving more students access to a full curriculum, and admitting that "down deep somewhere, you can't just say that schools exist for the staff."

"Small Arkansas schools pay big price for new money," by Eric Kelderman, Stateline.org, July 28, 2004

"Arkansas files appeal challenging school funding ruling," CNN.com, July 3, 2002

"Half of Arkansas school districts ask to join litigation in support of state's new funding formula," by Laura Tayman, American Association of School Administrators Leadership News, August 11, 2000

According to a new report from the Capital Research Center - penned by Education Intelligence Agency sleuth Mike Antonucci (see http://members.aol.com/educationintel/) - an organization you've heard of "files unfair labor practice charges and restraining orders. Circumvents the other side's negotiators. Threatens to replace employees who go on strike. Cuts off employee health insurance coverage. Crosses picket lines." A big three automaker? Halliburton? Martha Stewart? Nope, it's the National Education Association, which deals with its own employees' union in ways that would raise caterwauls if it were a school district giving what-for to teachers. (Don't feel too bad for the NEA employees, though; Antonucci notes that "the average New Jersey Education Association professional staffer earned more than $100,000 - with an additional $32,000 in benefits and 34 paid off-days. In 2001, the compensation package for professional staffers at the California Teachers Association exceeded $135,000.") And the Wall Street Journal reports on the growing membership of non-union teachers' associations in states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, and Washington. These new groups have contributed to flat membership growth at the NEA and AFT by siphoning off members unhappy with the unions' far-flung pronouncements on social policy and intransigence on various education reforms.

"Do as I say, not as I do," by Mike Antonucci, Capital Research Center, July 2004

"Nonunion teacher groups cost NEA membership and clout," Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal, July 28, 2004  (subscription required)

On Tuesday, the Democratic Convention adopted a platform containing a 3-page education plank that offers something for everybody, but nothing in particular, save for a pointed 3-paragraph dig at George W. Bush. Insofar as one can detect policy impulses in the fog, however, many of them resemble what Republicans also say. Think of them as standard education pabulum circa 2004: attention to "fundamental skills" and "fundamental values," "a great teacher in every classroom," closing learning gaps, higher graduation rates, citizenship education, parent partnerships, school choice (confined, for Democrats, to charter and magnet schools), making college affordable, etc.

The closest the platform comes to a provocative idea - and the closest that John Kerry has come - deals with teachers. In 1998, you may remember, he gave a much-noted speech that called for "ending teacher tenure as we know it." (He also urged that every public school become "essentially a charter school.") It seemed, for one brief shining moment six years ago, as if he might be breaking from the Democrats' ancient obeisance to the teacher unions.

A remnant endures in the new platform, presumably written by the Kerry team: "We must raise pay for teachers, especially in the schools and subjects where great teachers are in the shortest supply. . . . At the same time, we must create rigorous new incentives and tests for new teachers. . . . And teachers deserve due process protection from arbitrary dismissal, but we must have fast, fair procedures for improving or removing teachers who do not perform on the job."

Note that the "incentives and tests" apply only to new teachers. The word "tenure" is never used. It's a pale shadow of 1998. Indeed, it's muted since May 6 when Kerry said (per the Los Angeles Times) that "he would provide states more than $20 billion over the next decade to hire more teachers and raise their pay in return for new efforts to weed out poorly performing instructors. . . . Kerry would require all states receiving the new federal money to toughen the tests used to certify new teachers. Even more dramatically, he would require those states to simplify the process for teacher dismissal."

Predictably, the NEA threw a fit and summoned Kerry for career counseling. And the candidate has since eased off. Now he murmurs "due process" first, then suggests "improving or replacing teachers who do not perform on the job."

Okay, not a complete flip-flop. Sort of a cartwheel.

A new Brookings analysis of education proposals advanced thus far in the 2004 campaign sorts them into 4 categories and says this about Kerry's:

Preschool. "Senator Kerry has said that he wants to make preschool universal. However, in the interest of keeping deficits under control, he has backed away from a specific proposal in this area."

Elementary-Secondary. "Kerry advocates exempting education spending from [his proposed] cap on discretionary spending by proposing a ten-year $200 billion entitlement to the states for education spending. . . . Roughly half the total . . . would be devoted to No Child Left Behind (the signature Bush education law)."

After-school. "Kerry has proposed to expand and revamp the 21st Century Community Learning Center Program . . . from $1 billion to $2.5 billion . . . [and] shift the focus from exclusively academic benefits to include emphasis on values and decision-making skills that encourage children to avoid drugs, crime, and other risky behavior."

Higher education. "Kerry proposes to reduce the cost of attending college by expanding tuition tax credits for most households . . . from $1500 to $2500; they would be available for four years instead of two; and they would be made refundable."

Are you yawning yet? With the White House proffering equally drab ideas so far (e.g. taking high school more seriously), it seems likely that the 2004 education debate is going to hinge on spending levels, not ideas.

Kerry is dashing around dangling dollars - notably to the teacher union conventions earlier this month. There's the new $200 billion education "trust fund," to be financed by raising taxes. There's $27 billion to "fully fund" No Child Left Behind. There's a recent promise to "fully fund special needs education," too.

It's instructive to compare this Democratic platform to the 2000 version and to note how much gutsier and more eloquent was the education plank that Messrs. Gore and Lieberman ran on. Though smug about the Clinton record, it went on to say that "every teacher should pass a rigorous test to get [into the classroom]....Every failing school in America should be turned around - or shut down and reopened under new public leadership. . . . [N]o high school student graduates unless they have mastered the basics of reading and math. . . . Parents across the nation ought to be able to choose the best public school for their children. . . . High-quality, affordable pre-school should be fully available to every family. . . . . The achievement gap between students of color and the rest of America's students should be eliminated."

And all that to be accomplished in a single presidential term! Sky pie, sure, but ideas to stir the education blood, goals worth aspiring to. One might suppose Bush's 4-year push for school reform would invigorate his rivals to demand even greater change than Gore-Lieberman did. But no. In this campaign, pabulum reigns.

The editorial writers at USA Today recently accused Kerry of being "absent on school accountability" and to urge a "Sister Souljah moment" wherein he distances himself from the unions. At both of their July conventions, however, the Senator declined to follow that excellent counsel.

Bottom line: the teacher unions remain in charge of the Democrats' education policies and Kerry-Edwards refuse to rile them. Hence the ticket's position boils down to this: "We sort of agree with Bush about what's wrong with American education and yes, we voted for his bill, though we now have misgivings, but we promise to spend buckets more than he will and we'll make sure that education reform doesn't upset the educators."

Anyone for a nap 'til November? (If you're still awake in late August, we'll report on the GOP platform then. Early signs are not promising).

This article is adapted from a column that appeared on National Review Online.

"Kerry proposal would boost teachers, but with a price," by Ronald Brownstein and Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2004

"List Kerry as absent on school accountability," USA Today, July 14, 2004

"Education proposals in the 2004 presidential campaign," Steve Robblee, Simone Berkowitz, and Isabel Sawhill, Brookings Institution, June 23, 2004

When I learned recently that the Council for Basic Education had closed its doors, I felt terribly sad. According to an article in Education Week, some attributed its demise to a "tight fund-raising environment for education groups" and suggested that CBE had expired because it was swimming in a crowded pond. When I worked in Washington in the early 1990s, there were about 150 education organizations, and by now there must be far more. So CBE must have had a hard time making its voice heard above the din, especially when so many others seemed to be purveying a similar message.

But I wasn't especially saddened by the loss of one fish in that big pond of advocacy groups. I was saddened because I knew how far CBE had strayed from its roots. It did not begin in 1956 as an organization that ran programs in collaboration with other organizations. It was not a member of the education establishment. It did not partner with the federal government. It did not have a staff of twelve.

No, it began as a lonely outpost for a small, outspoken group of articulate critics who agreed that the public schools were foolishly trying to be all things to all people; who believed that progressive educationists had saddled the schools with bad ideas; and who insisted that the mission of the schools was not socialization but intellectual development.

The Council for Basic Education was founded by bold men and women who led a revolt against mediocrity, anti-intellectualism, and mindlessness in the public schools. Several of their founding board members were famous intellectuals, like Jacques Barzun and Clifton Fadiman. One of them, Arthur Bestor, wrote a searing attack on "regressive education" titled Educational Wastelands.

That book bears re-reading. It is as timely and engaging today as it was in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and every decade since then. Like his fellow board members, Bestor criticized school curricula that was intellectually barren and had no connection to the academic disciplines. In that book, he wrote, "The West was not settled by men and women who had taken courses in 'How to be a pioneer.' . . . I for one do not believe that the American people have lost all common sense and native wit so that now they have to be taught in school to blow their noses and button their pants."

CBE's main means of advancing its point of view was by publishing the CBE Bulletin. The Bulletin, like CBE, upheld the primacy of intellectual development as the chief mission of the schools. In the organization's first year, the editor of the CBE Bulletin was Harold L. Clapp. For many years afterward, the Bulletin was written by the acerbic Mortimer B. Smith. Time magazine once described the Bulletin as "a cranky, flea-sized publication that subsists on what it bites from the hide of fuzzy-minded educators." Smith's writing was a delight to read. No foolish fad, no curricular excess, no idiotic mandate escaped his sharp and witty pen.

A few years ago, I chanced upon a bound collection of Mortimer Smith's editorials titled A Decade of Comment on Education. It covered the years from 1956 to 1966. I discovered it by accident in the shelves of the New York University Library. Anyone who wants to encounter the fresh and fearless spirit of the authentic Council for Basic Education should read that book. Like Bestor's critique of the "life adjustment movement," this collection of Smith's essays for CBE is powerful and relevant, especially his discussion of curriculum, standards, and content. Smith divided the world into what he called two classes: "the good guys on the one side and all educationists on the other."

CBE, through the Bulletin, assailed the "look-say" method of teaching reading. It was highly skeptical of groupthink pedagogical experts. It derided the educationist belief that children should be free to choose what to study and to plan their activities without adult guidance. It ridiculed the "dogma of readiness," shared by nearly all professional educators, who believed that children could not be taught until they had reached a certain stage of "readiness." It positively detested the pedagogues who believed that little could be expected from slum children and therefore little should be taught to them.

CBE, from its earliest days, had a passionate commitment to academic integrity and to the egalitarian belief that all children should have the riches of an academic education. A. Graham Down strove to retain these ideals when he led CBE from 1974 until 1994. Down's successor, Christopher Cross, was recruited to make CBE a "player" on the national scene, and this he did. But as the organization changed with the times, as it branched out, sought grants, wooed foundations, entered into partnerships, launched projects and pursued government largesse, the original voice of CBE faded until it was merely a whisper.

As we mourn its death, it seems apropos to quote Mortimer Smith: ". . . while CBE's whole reason for existence is the improvement of schools we are not always sure that some of the changes that seem to be on the way will indeed involve improvement. We are glad to see the old educational establishment, the 'interlocking directorate' of educationists, lose some of its power, but sometimes we are a bit apprehensive of the new establishment, that rather amorphous body made up roughly of some of the large philanthropic foundations, the 'new faces' in the U.S. Office of Education, the commercial producers of school materials, and those who devise 'new curricula' with governmental funds."

Smith then went on to say, "It must be obvious that the Bulletin is wary of all establishments. Perhaps there is a place in the next ten years, as there was in the past ten, for an educational publication that speaks with an independent voice and is not committed to the assumptions of any establishment, old or new."

I remember when I first discovered Arthur Bestor, Jacques Barzun, Mortimer Smith, and the other critics of their generation. I was a graduate student at Teachers College and reading their work was akin to a thirsty man (or woman, in my case) suddenly discovering an oasis in a parched desert.

I mourn the loss of that CBE. That organization probably had a part-time staff of one, maybe with a volunteer assistant. That organization had a distinctive voice. That organization did not worry overly much about whether other organizations agreed with it or wanted to be its friends. That organization did not run programs. That organization did not compete for foundation funding. That organization was devoted solely to telling what it believed to be the truth about the hindrances to genuine education.

That organization died a long time ago, and I miss it.

Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

"Council for Basic Education closes doors," by David J. Hoff, Education Week, July 14, 2004

Gadfly is pleased to report the results of a recent study, to be published in Psychological Science this fall, comparing the effectiveness of "direct instruction" (where teachers actually teach, rather than observe or facilitate) and "discovery learning" (where children are given certain materials and are expected to "discover" scientific principles on their own) in science classrooms. It turns out that students exposed to direct instruction were far likelier to be "able to design at least three out of four experiments without confounds" and were better able to critically evaluate "deeply flawed experiments." To nobody's surprise, fans of discovery learning are struggling to discredit the research, arguing that the type of discovery learning studied is rarely used in the classroom anymore. But, at least one critic, Psychologist Richard Shavelson of Stanford University, admits that the study "uses a strong research design" and says he'd like to see it replicated with the "more typical" guided discovery that many teachers use.

"Instruction versus exploration in science learning," by Rachel Adelson, Monitor on Psychology, June 6, 2004

In the New York Sun, Andy Wolf reports that "virtually all schools [in New York City] received budget cuts that in some cases exceeded 20 percent," despite an increase of $264 million in total funding for Gotham's public schools in 2004-05. Where did the money go? Wolf suggests that it went to a variety of frills - curriculum "coaches" hired to implement the favored citywide reading and math programs of departed deputy chancellor Diana Lam; massive professional development contracts (often awarded in a no-bid process); a small schools initiative; and Mayor Bloomberg's plan to hold back underperforming third graders. Meanwhile, Wolf echoes reporting from local community papers suggesting that disaffection and turnover are high among principals and instructional leaders.

"Getting down to blood money," by Andrew Wolf, New York Sun, July 23, 2004

Jay Mathews's latest column at washingtonpost.com offers selections from emails he received after confessing his "deep ignorance about the home-schooling movement" earlier this summer. He makes it clear that the stereotype of home schoolers - usually depicted as fundamentalist or right-wing zealots - doesn't bear much relation to reality. In fact, there are many reasons why parents and children pursue home schooling, not all of them religious or political. And the benefits of home schooling can be tremendous. Mathews is no cheerleader, though; he quotes plenty of parents and children who have had negative experiences. All of the stories he recounts about this rapidly maturing movement are interesting and some are quite surprising.

National Center for Education Statistics June 2004

The National Center for Education Statistics is doing a markedly better job these days of gathering, analyzing and reporting data than of "getting the word out" about what you can learn from it. I don't know why it and the Education Department are so muted about so many first-rate statistical products. One surmises it's a consequence of submerging NCES in the new Institute of Education Sciences, which seems interested only in research and evaluation, not data, though the latter are generally more informative and unimpeachable. In any case, we have here another strong and illuminating (if tardy) report, based on the first installment of an important longitudinal study that began with the kindergarten class of 1998-99. The essence of this 68-page report is conveyed in a four-page concluding chapter, which says, among other things, that:

• Fifty-six percent of all U.S. kindergarteners are in full-day programs while the remainder attends for a half-day.
• Full-day programs are most often found in the South, least often in the Northeast, and more often in Catholic than public (or other private) schools.
• Poor and minority children are more apt to be in full-day programs than affluent and white youngsters.
• The instructional program is (proportionately) similar in full and half-day kindergarten programs, including nearly ubiquitous daily work on reading and language arts.
• "The children enrolled in a full-day program make greater gains in reading language arts over the course of the kindergarten year compared to those in half-day classes. The differences . . . are not only apparent when simple comparisons of gains are made, they persist when the comparisons of gains take into account other influential child and class characteristics."

If you'd like to see for yourself, it's publication NCES 2004-078 and you can find it on the web here. 

U.S. Department of Education May 2004

This publication is a revision of an earlier teachers' guide to the No Child Left Behind Act. It starts with an overview of the law and a long explanation of its controversial "Highly Qualified Teacher" requirements. The authors put much effort into clearing up teachers' misconceptions via numerous "Myth vs. Reality" subsections, and they include information on resources and rewards available to teachers under NCLB. The report closes with a chart-style comparison of federal, state, and local responsibilities under NCLB, and an overview of some state and local initiatives to promote teacher quality through professional development, recruitment, and retention. There is also additional information for ESL and special ed teachers. You can find by clicking here.