The Education Gadfly Weekly

Julian R. Betts, Andrew C. Zau, and Kevin KingPublic Policy Institute of California2005

In 2000, the San Diego city school system stood at the forefront of the reform movement when it adopted then-Superintendent Alan Bersin's Blueprint for Student Success - an ambitious set of reforms to improve students' reading skills. In that same year, the district contracted with the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) to analyze and assess student achievement. This report, From Blueprint to Reality: San Diego's Education Reforms, is the second in a series and looks exclusively at the Blueprint and its impact. (Although many of the Blueprint programs have been discontinued or experienced cutbacks since their inception, the basic framework still exists.) The study finds that, although some of the Blueprint's policies are more effective than others, overall it is accomplishing its goals. The Blueprint program employs three strategies for raising reading skills:
- Prevention: Seeks to head off illiteracy by extending classes, supplying up-to-date teaching materials, and providing teachers with additional training.

- Intervention: Targets struggling students and provides peer coaches as well as additional practice and instructional time in reading.

- Retention: Retains students who demonstrate below-grade - level literacy skills.

Some strategies, such as assigning peer coaches to struggling students, didn't yield positive results at the district level, but others are showing their worth. For example, the Extended Reading Program - in which struggling students are supervised for 90 minutes of before- or after-school reading - was a significant success. The Blueprint has proven most beneficial to those elementary and middle school students performing in the bottom decile on national reading exams. The numbers from high schools were less rosy, though not all bad. In the early years, the Blueprint showed small, even negative, impact on high school students. But the results are improving, suggesting that the program is going through some growing pains. The report offers no final verdict on the Blueprint, but the preliminary results are encouraging, both for San Diego and for urban education administrators who seek innovative, successful reform ideas for their own cities. The report is available here.

School Choice Demonstration Project, Georgetown University
Thomas Stewart, Ph.D., Patrick J. Wolf, Ph.D., and Stephen Q. Cornman, Esq.
October 2005

While choice opponents sometimes argue cynically that poor parents cannot be trusted to make good decisions for their children, these Georgetown researchers (and their funders at the Annie E. Casey Foundation) respected parents enough to ask them (in a series of focus groups) about their experiences in Washington, D.C.'s new, federally funded voucher program. Their answers are illuminating. Most families' and students' experiences with the program were overwhelmingly positive, and many parents reported that, after receiving an Opportunity Scholarship their children were more confident, performed better academically, and demonstrated increased enthusiasm for school. Says one elementary school parent: "This is what I tell my kids. I tell them that this is an opportunity for you to strive, do your best, take advantage of it, that's what I tell my children." Parents were especially enthusiastic about the rigorous standards of their children's new schools and the opportunity to get involved, though both presented challenges. Says one Hispanic parent, "For us there was a significant change more than anything because we were forced to go to English school to learn English ... when I realized all the homework was in English, so I had to stay awake all night with a translator and a dictionary." There have been bumps, such as the incident in which a teacher told a scholarship student (whose involvement in the program was supposed to be confidential): "If you don't stop acting like this, remember, you are here on a scholarship and we could put you out." The principal quickly handled that situation (one of the few examples of ostracism that researchers could find) to the parent's satisfaction. On the whole, participating private schools, including some of the nation's ritziest, are making the scholarship families feel like they belong. A middle school parent explains: "It's like the people there treat me like I'm a part of their family. The school is just so family-oriented. I mean I am so happy." If Jonathan Kozol wants to see people of different races and classes coming together to educate their children together, he could do worse than to visit some of the schools participating in the D.C. voucher program. See it for yourself here.

After months of heated debate, the Kansas State Board of Education officially thumbed its nose at the scientific community. Under the state's newly adopted science standards, Kansas schoolchildren will now be taught (we're not making this up) that not all scientific occurrences have "natural" explanations. Of course, the theory of evolution is the first bedrock principle to suffer under this new approach, but surely others will follow:

- Benjamin Franklin was wrong: Lightning really is an act of divine retribution

- Galileo Update: We are the center of the universe after all

- Know that wart on your hand that won't go away? It really is the toad's fault

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, voters in Dover threw out all the local school board members who favored the teaching of intelligent design in science classrooms. Now that is a sign of intelligence.

"Kansas School Board Approves Controversial Science Standards," by Jodi Wilgoren, New York Times, November 8, 2005

Amidst the clean-up efforts in Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco has proposed a plan to allow New Orleans' failing schools (an astonishing 102 of the city's 117 schools) to re-open as charters, free from the miserable New Orleans school board's overbearing regulations. "We will use innovative thinking, help from proven partners, and look to the charter school model as one of our options," Blanco said in front of the legislature's special session. "Now is the time for us to turn those schools around and create a system that benefits every child in that parish." Can it work? Hard to say at the moment, as there are few specifics on how a charter system would operate (Louisiana's charter school law is notoriously weak - see here for more). Some in the state, however, are squarely behind the idea, and for all the right reasons. "There's no reason to give the vested interests of today's system a veto over reforms," writes the editorial board of the Advocate, a Baton Rouge paper. "Let's face it, this is an easy call: adults and their patronage jobs, or children and their futures." And the state's House Education Committee is drafting legislation as Gadfly goes to press. The specifics of that legislation will ultimately determine whether the charter move is real or illusory.

"Blanco urges cuts as session opens," by Robert Travis Scott, Times-Picayune, November 7, 2005

"Reform system for the children," Advocate (Baton Rouge), November 9, 2005

"La. governor makes charter school proposal," CNN.com, November 4, 2005

"N.O. schools takeover idea has legs," by Laura Maggi, Times-Picayune, November 9, 2005

State capitals have been abuzz with talk of teacher merit pay. Unfortunately, that talk has rarely translated into action (see here) - until now. Tired of relying on quibbling politicians in Austin, Texas Governor Rick Perry took matters into his own hands and used his executive authority to institute the Lone Star State's first incentive pay program for teachers after the Legislature adjourned. Explained Perry, "the need for education reform is simply too great to wait for lawmakers to overcome their differences." But Texas isn't alone in enterprising spirit. Merit pay has gotten off the ground in Denver, too, at least in a limited sort of way. Last Tuesday voters passed ballot issue 3A, which begins implementation of merit pay for teachers. Meanwhile, Florida's education department is hosting workshops to re-write the rules that implement the Sunshine State's Performance-Based Pay Program law, which so far hasn't actually led to any performance pay due to district and union intransigence (see here). Could merit pay finally be on the march?

"Backers celebrate ProComp plan victory," by Nancy Mitchell, Rocky Mountain News, November 2, 2005

"Perry enacts teacher merit pay," by Janet Elliot, Houston Chronicle, November 4, 2005

For 40 years the United States has struggled to find the right approach to academic standards for K-12 education. Oversimplifying, this quest was catalyzed by the Coleman Report (1966) and A Nation at Risk (1983). The former said we can't rely on fiddling with school inputs to boost school outcomes, while the latter said our outcomes are sorely inadequate.

If we can't rely on inputs, but we need to do something about outcomes, the logical move is to spell out the outcomes we want and then work to ensure that kids and schools attain them.

That had long been done for college-bound kids via Regents exams, AP tests, colleges' own entrance prerequisites, etc. But it had never been done for all kids. And it needed to be.

This effort grew serious in 1989 when, at the Charlottesville summit, the governors and President George H.W. Bush set national education goals for the year 2000. One of these said, "American students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography."

The word they used was "competency." Today, we're more apt to say "proficiency." Still, the question instantly arose, who determines competency in particular subjects, and how would anyone know whether a kid or a school, a district or a state, had attained that level?

Now we're 16 years into answering that question and, frankly, it's a muddle, arising in large part from America's arcane education federalism.

Bush 41 and the governors assumed that states would be responsible for that sort of thing and that Washington would help and encourage in various ways.

Three things were bound to go wrong with that approach, however, and all of them have.

First, there is vast variability, inefficiency, duplication, and overlap in standards across fifty states.

Second, Uncle Sam's efforts to foster and encourage have made this process unbelievably complicated and confusing, including undesirable conflicts between the federally prompted standards and the states' own.

Third, the more pressure placed on attaining standards via high-stakes testing, incentives, interventions, and other forms of accountability - whether from state capitals or Washington - the likelier that those setting the standards would dumb them down.

The 1990s saw several abortive efforts to move toward something akin to national standards. Bush 41 put some money into the development of voluntary national standards by professional groups such as the National Council of Teachers of English. President Clinton proposed a national testing program based on NAEP. The Goals 2000 act included an ill-starred body called the National Education Standards and Assessment Council (NESAC) to oversee state standards, but it proved so controversial it was never appointed.

All these endeavors succeeded mainly in reinforcing the assumption that national standards and tests are not politically viable in contemporary America.

Meanwhile, the National Assessment Governing Board did set a form of national standards by specifying "achievement levels" - basic, proficient and advanced - for reporting NAEP scores. But NAEP doesn't report on units smaller than states, so in a sense we had national standards with little traction.

Comes 2001, Bush 43 and NCLB, and, in retrospect, a bad decision (see here) was made (though it was foreshadowed by Goals 2000 and all that had come before). Instead of embracing national standards in core subjects, then giving states flexibility as to how and when to get there, states were admonished to set their own standards, then obliged to get there all on the same timetable and via the same mechanisms.

A "race for the bottom" was inevitable, and now we're beginning to glimpse it (see here). It takes several forms, the most vivid of which is that many states have clearly set their expectations below NAEP's and are taking advantage of myriad ways to finagle even those expectations.

This is no solution to the nation being at risk. It's more like the old game of take the federal money but find ways to avoid making the changes that the money is supposed to induce.

So I conclude, as my friend Diane Ravitch and many others have, that we'd be better off with national standards, at least in reading, math, and science, and probably also history. States, districts, schools and teachers should be free to amplify and augment those standards and to specialize in various ways, within a regimen of school choice, but the core of the K-12 curriculum should be the same everywhere. And the tests by which progress is measured should also be the same everywhere.

Conceptually, that's easy. But anyone who is serious about it must begin to grapple with the tough implementation questions that instantly arise. Two are paramount.

First, who sets the standards? I don't have much use for the professional groups that bungled the job in the early 1990s, and I'm beginning to worry about the National Assessment Governing Board, too (see here).

Second, is it possible to have national standards and tests without, in effect, federalizing the delivery system? Three years at the Department of Education left me disbelieving that this can be run competently by Uncle Sam, even if that prospect weren't accompanied by profound constitutional, historical, and budgetary issues.

Plenty of other challenging questions also need to be addressed, and I'm not certain we have the will to tackle them, nor the requisite political consensus, especially between now and the reauthorization of NCLB. But surely the place to start is to recognize, as Ravitch makes clear, that the current NCLB approach isn't working well and probably cannot, so fraught is it with perverse incentives for states and districts and schools to do the wrong thing.

There was no hero to rush to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's aid Tuesday as California voters pummeled all four of his ballot propositions with "nos."

Two of these rebukes were particularly painful for education reformers. Proposition 74 would have lengthened from two to five years the time required for a public school teacher to earn tenure. And Proposition 75 would have given public union members (many of whom are educators) a check-off option to keep their dues from flowing to political campaigns. This latter proposal would have weakened the unions' ability to block myriad initiatives that are in the public good (but threaten their weakest members) like the expansion of charter schools or the adoption of performance pay - and Tuesday's referenda.

Though the thumbs-down from voters was resounding, don't hit the panic button just yet. For Tuesday's vote wasn't a referendum on education policy so much as it was a test of union power, and of Schwarzenegger's approach to governing.

Clearly, the public employee unions won this round. They heavily outspent Schwarzenegger - $172 million vs. $90 million - according to Stanford's Michael Kirst, and bragged about their ability to do so. California Teachers Association President Barbara Kerr, incensed that the governor didn't credit the unions for his 0 for 4 showing, told a room of union supporters Tuesday night, "This governor ... doesn't have the courage to say he was wrong, that we're the real heroes of California." Says Kirst, "If you think the unions are weak, this should end that" idea.

Even before the run-up to the election, the unions were flexing their muscles. When Schwarzenegger released his 2005 budget, the teacher groups were upset that dollars promised the year before were not included. So beginning this past spring, Kirst says, they spent over $9 million on attack ads - to which the governor simply did not, or could not afford to, respond.

But perhaps even more than a test of union power, this election was a test of Schwarzenegger's approach to governing. Frustrated by a slothful, recalcitrant legislature and special interests unwilling to find ways to address California's growing financial problems, the governor tried to muscle his way past them by appealing to the people. But the people largely stayed home. Voter turnout hovered around 30 percent, thereby amplifying the targeted get-out-the-vote power of the unions. And four other initiatives not backed by Schwarzenegger also went down swinging. To be sure, the defeat of propositions 74 and 75 constitutes a blow to school reform in California. But it's a blow from which reformers can recover and learn. "If you go directly after" the unions, says Kirst, "you've got to have a very sophisticated proposal and a lot of money." Today, it seems, the governor has neither. But fear not: he'll be baaack, and so will these promising policy ideas.

"Voters Reject Schwarzenegger's Bid to Remake State Government," by Michael Finnegan and Robert Salladay, Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2005

"Schwarzenegger Is Dealt a Stinging Rebuke by Voters," by John M. Broder, New York Times, November 9, 2005

"State Election Results: California Rejects Education Measures," Education Week, November 9, 2005 (Subscription required)

Editor's Note: This commentary first appeared in the New York Times on November 7, 2005.

While in office, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton both called for national academic standards and national tests in the public schools. In both cases, the proposals were rejected by a Congress dominated by the opposing party. The current President Bush, with a friendly Congress in hand, did not pursue that goal because it is contrary to the Republican Party philosophy of localism. Instead he adopted a strategy of "50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests" - and the evidence is growing that this approach has not improved student achievement. Americans must recognize that we need national standards, national tests and a national curriculum.

The release last month of test results by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is part of the Department of Education, vividly demonstrated why varying state standards and tests are inadequate. Almost all states report that, based on their own tests, incredibly large proportions of their students meet high standards. Yet the scores on the federal test (which was given to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders) were far lower. Basically, the states have embraced low standards and grade inflation.

Idaho claims that 90 percent of its fourth-grade students are proficient in mathematics, but on the federal test only 41 percent reached the Education Department's standard of proficiency. Similarly, New York reports that nearly 85 percent of its fourth graders meet state standards in mathematics, yet only 36 percent tested as proficient on the national assessment. North Carolina boasts an impressive 92 percent pass rate on the state test, but only 40 percent meet the federal standard.

In fourth-grade reading, the gaps between state and national reports are equally large. Georgia claims that 87 percent of its pupils are proficient in reading, but only 26 percent reached that level on the national exam. Alabama says that 83 percent of its students are proficient, but only 22 percent meet the federal standard.

The same discrepancies are found in the scores for eighth-grade reading, where Texas reports that 83 percent met the state standard, but the federal test finds that only 26 percent are proficient. Tennessee and North Carolina both claim that 88 percent are proficient readers, whereas 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively, met that mark on the federal test.

Why the discrepancies? The states function in a political environment. Educational leaders and elected officials want to assure the public that the schools are doing their jobs and making progress. The federal testing program, administered for the past 15 years by an independent, bipartisan governing board, has never been cowed by the demands of parents, school officials and taxpayers for good news.

In the No Child Left Behind law of 2001, Congress left it to each state to develop its own standards and tests, but added that the tests given by National Assessment of Educational Progress should serve as an external gauge of national and state-level achievement. The federal tests are considered the gold standard for good reason: they are the product of a long-term federal investment in research and development. Unlike the state tests, the federal program tries to align its performance standards with international education standards. Many states model their testing on the national program, but still cling to lower standards for fear of alienating the public and embarrassing public officials responsible for education.

The price of this local watering-down is clear. Our fourth-grade students generally do well when compared with their peers in other nations, but eighth-grade students are only average globally, and 12th graders score near the bottom in comparison with students in many European and Asian nations. Even our students who have taken advanced courses in mathematics and physics perform poorly relative to their peers on international tests.

Last month, the National Academy of Sciences released a report warning that our nation's "strategic and economic security," as well as our leadership in the development of new technologies, is at risk unless we invest heavily in our human capital; that is, the education of our people. The academy report made clear that many young Americans do not know enough about science, technology or mathematics to understand or contribute to the evolving knowledge-based society. The best way to compete in the global economy, the report maintained, is to ensure that American workers are "the best educated, the hardest-working, best trained, and most productive in the world."

It is fair to say that we will not reach that goal if we accept mediocre performance and label it "proficient." Nor will we reach that goal if we pretend that mathematics taught in Alaska or Iowa is profoundly different from the mathematics taught in Maine or Florida, or for that matter, in Japan and Hungary.

Unfortunately, the political calculations that resulted in the No Child Left Behind law adopting a strategy of letting the states choose their own standards and tests remain the reality. In general, Republicans are wary of national standards and a national curriculum, while Democrats are wary of testing in general. Both parties must come to understand that the states are not competing with each other to ratchet up student achievement. Instead, they are maintaining standards that meet the public's comfort level.

America will not begin to meet the challenge of developing the potential of our students until we have accurate reporting about their educational progress. We will not have accurate reporting until that function is removed from the constraints of state and local politics. We will be stuck with piecemeal and ineffective reforms until we agree as a nation that education - not only in reading and mathematics, but also science, history, literature, foreign languages and the arts - must be our highest domestic priority.

School Choice Demonstration Project, Georgetown University
Thomas Stewart, Ph.D., Patrick J. Wolf, Ph.D., and Stephen Q. Cornman, Esq.
October 2005

While choice opponents sometimes argue cynically that poor parents cannot be trusted to make good decisions for their children, these Georgetown researchers (and their funders at the Annie E. Casey Foundation) respected parents enough to ask them (in a series of focus groups) about their experiences in Washington, D.C.'s new, federally funded voucher program. Their answers are illuminating. Most families' and students' experiences with the program were overwhelmingly positive, and many parents reported that, after receiving an Opportunity Scholarship their children were more confident, performed better academically, and demonstrated increased enthusiasm for school. Says one elementary school parent: "This is what I tell my kids. I tell them that this is an opportunity for you to strive, do your best, take advantage of it, that's what I tell my children." Parents were especially enthusiastic about the rigorous standards of their children's new schools and the opportunity to get involved, though both presented challenges. Says one Hispanic parent, "For us there was a significant change more than anything because we were forced to go to English school to learn English ... when I realized all the homework was in English, so I had to stay awake all night with a translator and a dictionary." There have been bumps, such as the incident in which a teacher told a scholarship student (whose involvement in the program was supposed to be confidential): "If you don't stop acting like this, remember, you are here on a scholarship and we could put you out." The principal quickly handled that situation (one of the few examples of ostracism that researchers could find) to the parent's satisfaction. On the whole, participating private schools, including some of the nation's ritziest, are making the scholarship families feel like they belong. A middle school parent explains: "It's like the people there treat me like I'm a part of their family. The school is just so family-oriented. I mean I am so happy." If Jonathan Kozol wants to see people of different races and classes coming together to educate their children together, he could do worse than to visit some of the schools participating in the D.C. voucher program. See it for yourself here.

Julian R. Betts, Andrew C. Zau, and Kevin KingPublic Policy Institute of California2005

In 2000, the San Diego city school system stood at the forefront of the reform movement when it adopted then-Superintendent Alan Bersin's Blueprint for Student Success - an ambitious set of reforms to improve students' reading skills. In that same year, the district contracted with the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) to analyze and assess student achievement. This report, From Blueprint to Reality: San Diego's Education Reforms, is the second in a series and looks exclusively at the Blueprint and its impact. (Although many of the Blueprint programs have been discontinued or experienced cutbacks since their inception, the basic framework still exists.) The study finds that, although some of the Blueprint's policies are more effective than others, overall it is accomplishing its goals. The Blueprint program employs three strategies for raising reading skills:
- Prevention: Seeks to head off illiteracy by extending classes, supplying up-to-date teaching materials, and providing teachers with additional training.

- Intervention: Targets struggling students and provides peer coaches as well as additional practice and instructional time in reading.

- Retention: Retains students who demonstrate below-grade - level literacy skills.

Some strategies, such as assigning peer coaches to struggling students, didn't yield positive results at the district level, but others are showing their worth. For example, the Extended Reading Program - in which struggling students are supervised for 90 minutes of before- or after-school reading - was a significant success. The Blueprint has proven most beneficial to those elementary and middle school students performing in the bottom decile on national reading exams. The numbers from high schools were less rosy, though not all bad. In the early years, the Blueprint showed small, even negative, impact on high school students. But the results are improving, suggesting that the program is going through some growing pains. The report offers no final verdict on the Blueprint, but the preliminary results are encouraging, both for San Diego and for urban education administrators who seek innovative, successful reform ideas for their own cities. The report is available here.