The Education Gadfly Weekly

Ryan C. Amacher and Roger E. Meiners, The Independent Institute2004

This short book offers an overview of professorial tenure and a host of other issues in higher education, not to argue that tenure should be abolished but rather to show that it's not the major problem in colleges and universities today. Rampant costs, useless departments, frivolous courses, uninterested professors, inflated grades, and stifling bureaucracies are bigger worries. (A general decline in university curricula doesn't help matters.) The solution to these ills is simple in theory: promote decentralization and competition. The former idea, embraced so long ago by business that it's become a sort of holy writ, enables those with the best information to make decisions. By contrast, in higher education too much is decided by faculty committees (in which economics professors can make decisions about physics and poetry departments). At these meetings, the authors lament, clearly reliving a personal experience or two, "[c]ompetent faculty . . . spend afternoons trapped in conference rooms with blowhards who take hours to make pompous pronouncements about any issue." Eliminating such committees would promote competition, by empowering administrators to reward effective departments and reconsider weak ones (tough decisions that faculty worried for their jobs or reputations are unlikely to make). They also recommend better course descriptions (in part so students can be informed when making choices), a voucher program modeled on the GI Bill (of which they provide an enlightening history), and transparency (such as published course evaluations by students). Perhaps most ambitiously, they urge that centralized university systems and state boards be abolished in favor of campus autonomy, in order to replace politics, overhead and bloat with rational decision-making. The book's brevity means it cannot explore anything in much depth; grade inflation is relegated to three paragraphs, and the main recommendation - reporting grade distributions in addition to GPAs - doesn't, for example, consider how publishing the grading curve might affect students' choices about where to enroll. But the book is short, lively, and doesn't mince words. For those hoping to read about tenure, there's still plenty, and the punch line is this: it's a guarantee of due process, not lifetime employment, and would work better if universities were run better. The ISBN is 0945999895 and you can order a copy here.

George C. Leef, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004 The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum Barry Latzer, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently published these companion reports dealing with the importance and near extinction of a proper core curriculum at colleges and universities. In the first, author George C. Leef provides a guide to what an undergraduate core curriculum is and isn't, why a good one is important, and whose responsibility it is to ensure that students benefit from one. The latter half of this report describes actual core curricula in operation at fifteen colleges and universities that ACTA judges to have done a pretty good job of this. For the second report, The Hollow Core, author Barry Latzer surveyed 50 colleges in search of a "real" core curriculum - seven subjects that he and ACTA judge necessary for "every educated man and woman." (In case you're wondering: composition, U.S. government or American history, economics, foreign language, literature, math, and natural/physical science.) The news, as you might expect, is bleak: a quarter of the colleges in this group require none or just one of those subjects to be studied as part of their undergraduate core, and almost half require fewer than three. Thirty percent expect four or more of the seven. Among the least impressive performers are many of the country's most eminent colleges and universities. "Judging by our sample," ACTA concludes, "colleges and universities in the United States are not living up to their responsibilities to provide their students with a solid general education. It is time for those who care about the future of our young people - and the future of our nation - to become forceful advocates for a core curriculum." To order them, click here. 

Deinya Phenix, Dorothy Siegel, Ariel Zaltsman, and Norm Fruchter, Institute for Education and Social Policy, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University June 2004

In 1996, then New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew brought ten chronically underperforming schools into his purview, creating a geographically disconnected "virtual district" of schools. Having wrested control of these schools from their administrative sub-districts, he imposed a "Model of Excellence" that included reduced class size, extended school days and years, and mandatory staff development. This report analyzes student performance in the elementary and middle schools of Crew's "virtual district," dubbed the Chancellor's District and eventually including 58 schools. It seems they produced statistically significant gains in reading scores in only three years. Indeed, literacy improvement was a key goal of Crew's plan, and his project seems to have been quite a success in that regard. However, that focus seems to have negatively affected math testing, in which the Chancellor's District performed similarly to other chronically low-performing schools. The policy assumptions challenged by Crew's relative success should be noted, however. According to the authors, he showed how sub-district control of failing schools could be improved by "centralized management, rather than decentralized local control." Overall, a brief but thoughtful consideration of an important experiment; you can find it here.

Southern Regional Education Board2004

This useful report advocates and analyzes a number of policies that states can pursue in their efforts to attract and retain qualified teachers. The authors favor these five policies: recruiting teachers with content preparation, building connected data systems, continuing reform of teacher licensure, providing mentors for beginning teachers, and offering incentive pay. They also discuss three "emerging" policy solutions: alternative teacher preparation programs, new technologies for teacher development, and differing roles and incentives for teachers. The SREB provides current information on all of these topics and does an admirable job of emphasizing accountability and evaluation, merit-based compensation, and continuing professional development. It also features helpful examples of real reform efforts in SREB states. You can get it by clicking here.

Charter news isn't just the AFT report this week, though it doesn't get any better. The California Charter Academy, a private management organization, announced that it's abruptly closing 60 charter campuses in California, leaving some 10,000 students stranded days before the opening of school. Critics will doubtless chalk this up as one more example of charter operator incompetence - the CCA fell afoul of a state law cracking down on long-distance management of schools, as well as dwindling state aid to charters - but it's also a textbook case of poor charter sponsorship. In California, most charters are sponsored by local districts; why were they asleep at the switch as CCA imploded? As we've seen in other cases (see here), good sponsorship matters. A proactive and engaged authorizer willing to dish out tough love might have been able to forestall this catastrophe for students and parents. A sponsor in it to make money (as seems to have been the case for the California school systems that agreed to be non-resident sponsors for the CCA schools) is apt to have far laxer criteria.

"Charter Academy shuts 60 schools," by Erika Hayasaki, Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2004 (registration required)

This week's firestorm over the performance of charter schools can be traced to mischief by the charter-hating American Federation of Teachers and a (generally very able) New York Times reporter's susceptibility to being drawn into its web.

For months, it appears, AFT analysts have been beavering away at their own analysis of new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) regarding the scores of 4th and 8th graders attending a sample of charter schools in 2003. (The 8th grade sample, for the most part, proved too small to draw conclusions.)

I had played a tiny role (with Education Leaders Council chief Lisa Keegan) in persuading the feds that charter schools deserve to be noticed by NAEP, much as private schools have long been. If they are a legitimate, durable form of schooling - after all, there are now 3000+ of them enrolling around 700,000 kids - it's important for the "Nation's Report Card" to monitor their performance.

So the schools participating in NAEP in 2003 were selected in such a way that a representative sample of charter schools with 4th grades was included. (These schools are located in six states.) The resulting reading and math scores have been sitting for nine months on the website of the National Center for Education Statistics, waiting to be mined, massaged and analyzed by anyone with the requisite prowess and motivation. Meanwhile, NCES analysts have been (slowly) working on their own report.

The "charter movement" (myself included) ought to be chagrined that the AFT did this first, because that meant the maiden NAEP-based report on charter school performance would come chock-full of union spin and political agenda.

Pause, for a moment, on the politics of this. The main thrust of the AFT press release accompanying its report is that the federal government has "repeatedly delayed" the release of the charter-school results. This despite the manifest fact that the data have been accessible to the entire world for most of a year! (Else the AFT couldn't have analyzed them.) This being Washington, the smirky, ugly implication is some sort of "cover up" of bad news by the Bush administration, which the AFT would like to depict as a major booster of this hated education reform. The Times piled on a day later with an editorial making the point explicit.

One might reasonably fault NCES for sloth in this analysis, as in others. (A recent and very interesting report on kindergarten participation was four years in production.) But the cover-up hint is ridiculous. The data have been in plain view. Besides, while the White House and Bush-Cheney team have said little about charter schools for months, guess who is urging the country to create many more of them? Yes, indeedy, the Democratic Party and Senator John Kerry, the AFT's candidate, a man who in 1998 urged that every public school become a charter school! (Today, the Senator's website says: "Enacting public school choice programs and expanding the number of charter schools in the country are important ways to provide students and families with the ability to choose the schools that best meets their needs.")

The AFT shrewdly offered Times reporter Diane Jean Schemo an exclusive, and she set to work. That included asking my opinion of some charts drawn from the report. (She didn't disclose their provenance; in retrospect I surely should have asked.) I said a lot of things but, as journalists customarily do, Ms. Schemo picked the quotes - about "dismaying" charter scores and the need for "tough love" from charter authorizers - that buttressed her story line.

That line - the headline story in Tuesday's Times - was mostly wrong, however. The lead said the NAEP-based comparison "shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools."

I can scarcely count the ways that is wrong, or partly wrong, or at least misleading. But let me note five points that any fair-minded reader needs to consider.

First, on key comparisons, especially by students' race, there is no statistically significant difference between the performance of kids in charter schools and traditional public schools. This is especially salient considering how heavily charter schools are patronized by black and Hispanic families. Their kids aren't doing worse in charter schools. (Unfortunately, they're also not doing better. But they may be more content with the new schools on other grounds, such as safety, size, etc.)

Second, one-time "snapshot" data of a single cohort of kids, which is all that NAEP can supply the first time around, tell you nothing about the academic achievement of children before they entered their charter schools - and just about everyone knows that a big fraction of the youngsters enrolling in charters were already behind the education eight-ball as a result of dismal performance in previous schools. Parents whose kids are thriving in traditional public schools are not apt to move them. Those transferring their daughters and sons into charters are often desperate. (NB: As Paul Peterson and colleagues pointed out in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, if the AFT is going to ignore these "selection effects" when examining charter schools, it should also do so when looking at private schools - and admit that their superior NAEP results say something about their superior performance!)

Third, when judging a school, one ought not settle for absolute test scores alone. (This is a shortcoming of NCLB, too, at least as currently interpreted by the Education Department.) What one most wants to know about a school is how rapidly its pupils are making progress from wherever they started, i.e. how much academic value is the school itself adding. You can't determine that from NAEP data. But other studies, such as those of Tom Loveless at Brookings, indicate that charter pupils are making greater gains than their age-mates in traditional public schools, even if their absolute test scores remain too low. (I'm reliably informed that new analyses from Florida and California show the same pattern for those states' charters.)

Fourth, charter schools are astoundingly varied. We've known for ages that hanging a "charter" sign over the door doesn't assure a good school, or predict a bad school, nor can one readily generalize about them. In fact, the variability among charter schools surpasses that of regular public and private schools. That's one reason they're hard to study - because having a "charter" may be less important than the school's core mission, which might be dropout recovery, or the arts, or bilingualism, or giving new options to disabled children. Some of the best schools I've ever been in are charter schools, some of which are blowing the lid off test scores in such vexed communities as Boston, New York and Chicago. And some of the worst - and flakiest - schools I've ever been in are charter schools. Yet people are choosing them.

Fifth. Or they're not choosing them. Unlike traditional public schools, the charter movement buries its dead. (At least it does when authorizers are conscientious.) Perhaps the cheapest shot in the Times article is the suggestion that the closing of some 80 charter schools (the Center for Education Reform says the correct number is more like 300) represents some sort of institutional failure or accountability malfunction. Nothing could be further from the truth. The disappearance of unsuccessful charter schools is one of the great strengths of the whole concept. Would that it happened more often!

Bottom line: Beware teacher unions bearing gifts, especially in an election year. And don't assume that the news the Times deems fit to print is always accurate or complete.

"Nation's charter schools lagging behind, U.S. test scores reveal," by Diana Jean Schemo, New York Times, August 17, 2004 (registration required)

"Bad news on the charter front," New York Times, August 18, 2004 (registration required)

"Classes of last resort," by Floyd Flake, New York Times, August 19, 2004 (registration required)

"Charter school performance study stirs debate," by Dennis Kelly and Liz Szabo, USA Today, August 18, 2004

"Dog eats AFT's homework," by William Howell, Paul Peterson, and Martin West, Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2004 (subscription required)

"Times Crusade I - Anti-NCLB," by Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles on Slate.com, August 18, 2004  (scroll down)

"Charter schools produce strong student achievement," Center for Education Reform press release, August 17, 2004 

"Paige issues statement regarding New York Times article on charter schools," U.S. Department of Education press release, August 17, 2004

"Charter Schools: Achievement, Accountability, and the Role of NCLB," Brookings Institution, 2003 

"First-Ever NAEP Charter School Results Repeatedly Delayed," American Federation of Teachers press release, August 17, 2004

"Charter School Achievement on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress,"   F. Howard Nelson, Bella Rosenberg, Nancy Van Meter, American Federation of Teachers, August 17, 2004

Education Department Spokesperson Issues Statement Regarding New York Times' Articles on Charter Schools, August 18, 2004

We couldn't make it up. Here's the Los Angeles Times on professional development courses that some California teachers are taking to renew their certification and earn higher salaries: "Sara Telona learned the choreography for Mexican folklore dances, mastered the words to folk songs and took a crash course in marimba and xylophone playing. . . . To complete the course 'Sharks: Myth and Facts,' the teachers must watch a National Geographic video about the great white shark and read three books. Then, they answer several fill-in-the-blank sheets and write an essay on how their lives would be affected if sharks became extinct. . . . [The] 'I'm So Stressed I Could Scream' course taught . . . stress reduction techniques and helped with classroom management. Instead of disciplining her slightly rowdy class after lunch, [one teacher] started reading a book to calm students and herself." For more on miseducation by professional development, read Sandra Stotsky's Stealth Curriculum, and stay tuned for Fordham's report on professional development follies later this fall.

"Enrichment courses let teachers be students," by Cynthia Daniels, Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2004 (registration required)

Teachers' union types are in a snit over Department of Education funding for the Arkansas Virtual Academy (AVA), an online charter school that uses curricula from K12, a venture headed by former Secretary of Education William Bennett. (Full disclosure: Fordham's Finn is on its board.) The conservative pundit is accused of using political connections to secure the federal grant and the Academy is accused of siphoning off public dollars to support home schooling. (Turns out many students using AVA - which is a public school, albeit virtual - are former home schoolers or private schoolers.) We'll let pass the absurdity of the NEA complaining about the use of political connections to get things done. To critics, the fact that AVA gets three applicants for every available spot - a clear indication that the present system is not fulfilling a need - is irrelevant. So is the fact that, according to an AVA spokesman, 80 percent of AVA students would have been assigned to a district or school on the needing-improvement list. The establishment mantra: change is bad for us, and thus bad.

"Grants to Bennett's K12 Inc. challenged," eSchoolNews Online, August 16, 2004

"Federal grant to Bennett's K12, Inc. questioned," by David J. Hoff and Michelle R. Davis, Education Week, July 28, 2004

School leaders in Philadelphia, like most everywhere, are currently so hamstrung by teacher contracts and union regulations that they have virtually no control over the hiring and firing of their own staff. In the City of Brotherly Love, however, help may be on the way. Under a new proposal put forward by district leaders, principals in schools that have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for several years will be allowed to gut their staff and, with the help of a committee of parents and teachers, select a new team of teachers. Unsurprisingly, many teachers feel threatened by the proposal, with high school teacher Lynn Dixon complaining that under the plan "you will get nothing but puppets and Stepford wives teaching your children. No one will stand up for themselves." Dixon goes on to criticize the plan for giving too much "power" to principals - ostensibly the leaders of the school. Though the local teachers' union is vigorously contesting the proposal, the city education commission may simply opt to impose it - a right that, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was granted when the state took over the city's schools in 2001.

"Plan would let principals pick staff," by Susan Snyder, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 2004

Citing the Sunshine State's controversial Blaine Amendment - which states that "no revenue . . . shall be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution" - Florida's First District Court of Appeal recently struck down the 1999 state law that allows students to use tuition vouchers (Opportunity Scholarships) to escape persistently failing public schools. The court's majority ruled that "there is no dispute that state funds are paid to sectarian schools" and that "if Floridians wish to remove or lessen the restrictions of the no-aid provision, they can do so by constitutional amendment." As the Wall Street Journal reports, far from open and shut, this case is in fact far more complicated. If the Florida Supreme Court upholds the lower court's ruling, then a host of other state funding programs could be in constitutional jeopardy, including funding for medical treatment at religious hospitals, rent to churches used as polling stations, Medicaid, subsidized child care, and state-funded scholarships used at religious universities. Since the U.S. Supreme Court opted not to take the Blaine Amendment head on earlier this year in Locke v. Davey (click here for more), other Blaine states will no doubt be watching closely to see how Florida's Supreme Court deals with this ever-dicey issue.

"Appeal court says Florida voucher law is unconstitutional," by Mary Ellen Klas, Miami Herald, August 16, 2004 (registration required)

"Don't Blaine Florida," Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2004  (subscription required)

Deinya Phenix, Dorothy Siegel, Ariel Zaltsman, and Norm Fruchter, Institute for Education and Social Policy, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University June 2004

In 1996, then New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew brought ten chronically underperforming schools into his purview, creating a geographically disconnected "virtual district" of schools. Having wrested control of these schools from their administrative sub-districts, he imposed a "Model of Excellence" that included reduced class size, extended school days and years, and mandatory staff development. This report analyzes student performance in the elementary and middle schools of Crew's "virtual district," dubbed the Chancellor's District and eventually including 58 schools. It seems they produced statistically significant gains in reading scores in only three years. Indeed, literacy improvement was a key goal of Crew's plan, and his project seems to have been quite a success in that regard. However, that focus seems to have negatively affected math testing, in which the Chancellor's District performed similarly to other chronically low-performing schools. The policy assumptions challenged by Crew's relative success should be noted, however. According to the authors, he showed how sub-district control of failing schools could be improved by "centralized management, rather than decentralized local control." Overall, a brief but thoughtful consideration of an important experiment; you can find it here.

George C. Leef, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004 The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum Barry Latzer, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently published these companion reports dealing with the importance and near extinction of a proper core curriculum at colleges and universities. In the first, author George C. Leef provides a guide to what an undergraduate core curriculum is and isn't, why a good one is important, and whose responsibility it is to ensure that students benefit from one. The latter half of this report describes actual core curricula in operation at fifteen colleges and universities that ACTA judges to have done a pretty good job of this. For the second report, The Hollow Core, author Barry Latzer surveyed 50 colleges in search of a "real" core curriculum - seven subjects that he and ACTA judge necessary for "every educated man and woman." (In case you're wondering: composition, U.S. government or American history, economics, foreign language, literature, math, and natural/physical science.) The news, as you might expect, is bleak: a quarter of the colleges in this group require none or just one of those subjects to be studied as part of their undergraduate core, and almost half require fewer than three. Thirty percent expect four or more of the seven. Among the least impressive performers are many of the country's most eminent colleges and universities. "Judging by our sample," ACTA concludes, "colleges and universities in the United States are not living up to their responsibilities to provide their students with a solid general education. It is time for those who care about the future of our young people - and the future of our nation - to become forceful advocates for a core curriculum." To order them, click here. 

Ryan C. Amacher and Roger E. Meiners, The Independent Institute2004

This short book offers an overview of professorial tenure and a host of other issues in higher education, not to argue that tenure should be abolished but rather to show that it's not the major problem in colleges and universities today. Rampant costs, useless departments, frivolous courses, uninterested professors, inflated grades, and stifling bureaucracies are bigger worries. (A general decline in university curricula doesn't help matters.) The solution to these ills is simple in theory: promote decentralization and competition. The former idea, embraced so long ago by business that it's become a sort of holy writ, enables those with the best information to make decisions. By contrast, in higher education too much is decided by faculty committees (in which economics professors can make decisions about physics and poetry departments). At these meetings, the authors lament, clearly reliving a personal experience or two, "[c]ompetent faculty . . . spend afternoons trapped in conference rooms with blowhards who take hours to make pompous pronouncements about any issue." Eliminating such committees would promote competition, by empowering administrators to reward effective departments and reconsider weak ones (tough decisions that faculty worried for their jobs or reputations are unlikely to make). They also recommend better course descriptions (in part so students can be informed when making choices), a voucher program modeled on the GI Bill (of which they provide an enlightening history), and transparency (such as published course evaluations by students). Perhaps most ambitiously, they urge that centralized university systems and state boards be abolished in favor of campus autonomy, in order to replace politics, overhead and bloat with rational decision-making. The book's brevity means it cannot explore anything in much depth; grade inflation is relegated to three paragraphs, and the main recommendation - reporting grade distributions in addition to GPAs - doesn't, for example, consider how publishing the grading curve might affect students' choices about where to enroll. But the book is short, lively, and doesn't mince words. For those hoping to read about tenure, there's still plenty, and the punch line is this: it's a guarantee of due process, not lifetime employment, and would work better if universities were run better. The ISBN is 0945999895 and you can order a copy here.

Southern Regional Education Board2004

This useful report advocates and analyzes a number of policies that states can pursue in their efforts to attract and retain qualified teachers. The authors favor these five policies: recruiting teachers with content preparation, building connected data systems, continuing reform of teacher licensure, providing mentors for beginning teachers, and offering incentive pay. They also discuss three "emerging" policy solutions: alternative teacher preparation programs, new technologies for teacher development, and differing roles and incentives for teachers. The SREB provides current information on all of these topics and does an admirable job of emphasizing accountability and evaluation, merit-based compensation, and continuing professional development. It also features helpful examples of real reform efforts in SREB states. You can get it by clicking here.