The Education Gadfly Weekly

Valerie E. Lee and David Burkam, Economic Policy Institute
September 2002

This hundred-page book from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute was written by Valerie E. Lee and David Burkam of the University of Michigan. Their main thesis: due to socio-economic and family factors, low-income (and, disproportionately, minority) youngsters are already behind the 8-ball, educationally speaking, upon arrival in kindergarten. Then they enter inferior schools, which worsens academic inequality. (The database is the U.S. Education Department's "early childhood longitudinal study.") What to do about this unhappy tangle? Definitely not vouchers or school choice, say the authors. They edge up to but cannot bring themselves to recommend public-policy involvement in family structure. This leaves them with the usual recommendations: more and better pre-school, more equitable distribution of technology, better public schools and something called "more equitable distribution of children across public schools," which appears to mean involuntary integration. Overall, it's one of those studies that does a far better job of documenting a familiar problem than at shedding new light on possible solutions. The ISBN is 1932066020. For more information, see http://www.epinet.org/books/starting_gate.html.

National Archives and the National History Day
September 2002

To commemorate the 215th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, President Bush last month unveiled a three-pronged initiative to increase American students' and the general public's understanding of American history. One part - the National Endowment for the Humanities' "We the People" project - was described in last week's Gadfly. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=40#590.) The second part of the initiative is "Our Documents," a special web site (located at www.OurDocuments.gov) launched by the National Archives and intended, says the President, to "bring one hundred of America's most important documents from the National Archives to classrooms and communities across the country." The website boasts a list of "Milestone Documents" that include classics like the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Articles of Confederation (1777), as well as less celebrated documents such as the Treaty of Paris (1783). There are more modern additions as well, including Executive Order 10730: Desegregation of Central High School (1957) and the Test Ban Treaty (1963), with many more to come. But this project isn't just for history buffs; it also offers students awards and scholarships, provides supplemental information and lesson plans for teachers, and sponsors competitions, contests and discussions about important events in American history. See http://www.OurDocuments.gov.
NB: The third component of the President's initiative to combat historical illiteracy is a "We the People" Forum to be convened by the White House in February 2003. It is intended to address ways to improve the teaching of American history and civics in schools and universities. According to President Bush, "the primary responsibility for teaching history and civics rests with our elementary and secondary schools, and they've got to do their job. The federal government can help." Hopefully the forum - which will take shape in the coming months - will rally educators to strengthen their students' understanding and appreciation of U.S. history.

Michael deCourcy Hinds, Carnegie Corporation of New York
2002

Michael deCourcy Hinds wrote this 17-pager as part of the "Carnegie Challenge 2002" series, intended by the Carnegie Corporation of New York "to lift up ideas and issues in a way that we hope will elevate them to the national agenda." This one wants the national agenda to begin treating teachers "as modern clinical professionals." It's based on Carnegie's assumption (built into its multi-million dollar "Teachers for a New Era" initiative) that the way to do this is by transforming colleges of education into "schools of modern clinical practice." The basic strategy is to solve America's teacher quality problem by fixing its ed schools - which Carnegie seeks to do by pumping money into them. Two-year "residency" programs for new teachers are a key element of this strategy, as Carnegie continues its decades-old effort to make teaching more professional by making it more like medicine. Though the foundation can legitimately claim some ancient credit for having helped to strengthen medical education in America, by supporting Abraham Flexner's influential 1910 critique of medical schools, it remains to be seen whether this can be done for a field that rests so lightly on science and so heavily on hunch, ideology and preference. Flexner, it may be recalled, wrote that "...The curse of medical education is the excessive number of schools. The situation can improve only as weaker and superfluous schools are extinguished." That is surely not Carnegie's view, at least not its public view, of teacher education. We wish them well, though. It's surely worth trying multiple routes to better teachers in U.S. primary-secondary schools. We wish, however, that the Carnegie crowd were more tolerant of those who would try different routes-and committed to having their programs evaluated by people who don't start off with a predisposition to like them. You can find this paper on the web at http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/teachered.pdf.

Michael DeArmond, Sara Taggart and Paul Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington
May 2002

This 28-page contribution by the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education, also supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, examines five education trends and their implications for school buildings and other facilities. It offers six criteria for making decisions about facilities. And it closes with case studies of two communities (Portland, Oregon and Niagara Falls City) that have done well at devising smart ways to handle their facilities challenges. You can find a copy at http://www.aecf.org/publications/data/facilities.pdf or http://www.crpe.org/Publications/downloads/report_facilitiesweb.pdf.

Robin Lake, Abigail Winger and Jeff Petty, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington
May 2002

The University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education recently published this useful hundred-page guide to starting new schools. Funded (in part) by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the guide helps would-be school founders think through their legal options, test their market, assemble a leadership team, follow the crumbs through the political maze, develop the academic program, recruit students, work with parents and more, including such mundane but crucial items as getting liability insurance and managing the office. This will prove a valuable resource for anyone considering the creation of a charter school or similar program. You can obtain a copy by surfing to http://www.aecf.org/publications/data/newschoolshdbk.pdf or http://www.crpe.org/Publications/downloads/report_handbookweb.pdf.

Lance T. Izumi with K. Gwynne Coburn and Matt Cox, Pacific Research Institute
September 2002

Following the lead of the Heritage Foundation's No Excuses project, which identified high-performing schools that defy the demographic odds, Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute has analyzed successful high-poverty schools in the Golden State. Izumi interviewed the principals of eight California elementary schools - all with at least eighty percent of their students on the government-subsidized free lunch program - that fared well on the state's academic performance index, which is based on their scores on the Stanford 9 and the California Standards Test in English Language Arts. The report profiles each school, identifying those factors that its principal thought were integral to the school's success. Contrary to the child-centered approach taught in most ed schools, these principals report that teacher-directed instruction played a key role in the success of their schools. The principals all supported Open Court, a phonics-based program for the instruction of reading, and many principals pointed to the availability of a full or part time reading specialist or coach as important support for the teachers. The principals also universally supported the setting of goals in order to meet state academic standards, the use of frequent testing to measure student progress in this regard, and the need for regular standards-based professional development, particularly if it emphasizes collaboration among the teachers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the principals were ambivalent about the requirement that teachers be certified, stating that their teachers with emergency certification often performed as well or better than those who had gone through the conventional certification process. The report is available at http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/educat/they_have_overcome.pdf.

Christopher Barnes, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute
September 2002

NAEP results, combined with state tests, give us a pretty good idea how well (or poorly) our students and schools are performing. But how well, and precisely what, are our teachers teaching? To find out, the Manhattan Institute commissioned the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis to survey a national sample of fourth and eighth grade teachers. Teachers of those grades - chosen both because they are two grades for which we have NAEP data and because they mark the end of "primary" and "middle" schooling - were asked about their "teaching philosophies, their classroom teaching methods and practices, their academic expectations for their students, and their opinions on other issues of education policy." The results are both fascinating and alarming. In the report's foreword, our own (and formerly Manhattan's own) Chester Finn highlights five findings that are "particularly vexing because of the chasm they display between the views of teachers and the expectations of [standards-based] reformers": "First, a majority of teachers in both fourth and eighth grade opt for 'student-directed learning' rather than 'teacher-directed learning.' & Second, three quarters of teachers have embraced the college-of-education dogma that the purpose of schooling is to help youngsters "learn how to learn" rather than to acquire specific information and skills. & Third, not even two out of five teachers in fourth grade base their students' grades primarily on a "single, class-wide standard," while the majority place heavier emphasis on individual children's abilities. & Fourth, teachers do not seem to have terribly high expectations for their pupils when it comes to how much and how well they will end up learning. & Finally, and most bluntly, one third of fourth grade teachers and 30 percent of eight grade teachers do not agree that 'a teacher's role is primarily to help students learn the things that your state or community has decided students should know.'" Given that No Child Left Behind is now the law of the land, all who have a stake in its implementation will want to read this report to gain a better understanding of the challenges ahead in getting teachers (and ed schools) to buy into standards-based reform. You'll find this report on the web at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/cr_28.pdf.

This week's Chronicle of Philanthropy features a trio of articles by Meg Sommerfeld on charter schools. "Nonprofit Lesson Plans" looks at charters launched by charities such as the YMCA, and some of the rewards and challenges for those schools and charities. "Charter Program Aims to Teach Success to Hispanic Youngsters" profiles the National Council of La Raza, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit group that advocates and sponsors charter schools as a way to improve education opportunities for Hispanic children. "How 'Charter' Schools Are Run: a Primer" explains the defining features of charters and how many such schools are in operation across the country. (Articles are available to subscribers only.)

In a recent meeting with reporters in Detroit, Education Secretary Rod Paige spoke heresy to the education establishment. He asserted that the "teacher shortage" is "contrived" and that many individuals who would make good teachers are shut out by the current system. He's right.

For more than a decade, educational Cassandras have been warning that the U.S. faces a "crisis" in recruiting teachers for public school classrooms. Newspaper articles warn of looming disaster as aging teachers retire in droves, leaving public schools scrambling for warm bodies to put in classrooms. We're told that two million new teachers are urgently needed and that, unless taxpayers reach deep into their pockets, throngs of children will attend classrooms with unqualified teachers.

These self-serving crisis forecasts were wrong and remain wrong. The faulty analysis underlying the "two million new teachers" forecast came from a federal study that used projections of student enrollment, student-teacher ratios, and teacher turnover to estimate the total number of teacher hires over a decade ("Predicting the Need for Newly Hired Teachers in the United States to 2008-09," by William J. Hussar, National Center for Education Statistics, August 1999). These projections were picked up by media and widely disseminated by education interest groups. But they were based on an erroneous assumption. The forecaster ignored the fact that many teachers who leave the school workforce in a given year return one or two years later. All he did was cumulate the gross outflow of teachers for a decade while ignoring the reflux of teachers who had withdrawn temporarily from the schools. Yet returning teachers account for over one-third of new teacher hires in any year. In fact, every year our colleges and universities continue to graduate education majors far in excess of net new teacher hires.

The Cassandras also ignored the business cycle. It's true that in 2000-2001 many school districts found themselves with more teacher exits and fewer applicants than in earlier years. Many had difficulties filling vacancies in certain subjects. But their situation was hardly unique. Hospitals also struggled to recruit nurses, computer firms had trouble finding programmers, and even the local Taco Bell was hard-pressed to find workers for its fast-food counter. Unemployment rates in 1999-2000 hit forty-year lows that made it difficult for virtually all employers, including school districts, to fill vacancies. But that was then and this is now. With the recession and the deceleration of K-12 enrollment growth, many school districts are again awash in teaching applications.

Most districts have adequate resources to put qualified teachers in classrooms and are doing so. But they could do a better job with the resources they have if key reforms were made, beginning with barriers to entry - Secretary Paige's point. In professions such as medicine, law, dentistry, or accounting, states issue a single license. By contrast, in teaching, a typical state issues 100+ different licenses and endorsements (Missouri currently issues 178). And these are just current licenses. Deciphering state teacher certification systems rivals the human genome project in complexity. Not surprisingly, few school districts - even the wealthiest - are fully in compliance.

State boards of education (or legislatures) must overhaul these Byzantine certification systems that throttle supply but do little to raise quality. That overhaul should include fast-track alternative certification systems for individuals who already hold baccalaureate degrees. Experience with the federal Troops to Teachers program and state experiments with alternative-entry programs suggest that there is a sizable pool of well-educated career changers who would like to become teachers at current levels of wages and benefits. But the barriers to entry are too high. States need to lower those barriers and at least enable schools to audition these potential recruits.

School districts must also develop more efficient, market-oriented compensation policies. Unfortunately, nearly all of them still determine teacher pay according to salary schedules based on years of teaching experience and graduate education credit hours. These schedules apply to all teachers - from kindergarten to high school physics - regardless of subject expertise, school conditions, or individual effectiveness. Such rigid schedules have two unfortunate consequences. First, they produce shortages. Kindergarten teachers and high school physics teachers are both important, but their alternative earnings opportunities differ greatly and the teacher-pay system must take account of that. Imagine how well university business and engineering schools would be staffed if they paid faculty salaries no higher than the sociology department.

These rigid schedules also guarantee that poor children will get weaker teachers. School working conditions differ, and schools with many poor and minority students are often located in tough or inconvenient neighborhoods. Many teachers use their seniority to transfer to more pleasant and accessible environs. By paying the same rates in every school, these salary schedules make it harder for inner city schools to get the most experienced instructors. The military has long recognized the need for "hazardous duty pay." Public schools need to do something similar.

When additional money becomes available, rather than boosting the pay for new teachers, many school districts "backload" pay, i.e. provide larger increases to senior teachers who had "topped out" on the salary schedules. (That's because teachers who haven't yet been hired have no representation on the union side of the bargaining table while veterans have ample clout.)

But districts are not the only culprits in when it comes to backloading. States are culpable as well. Private sector employers have long recognized that, to recruit young, mobile professionals, they must provide fringe benefits that are mobile as well. Hence private sector employers (and most higher-education institutions) have shifted from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans. Young high-tech workers and college professors taking their first job know that, if they change employers in a few years (as many do), their benefits will travel with them.

By contrast, public school teachers are locked into defined benefit plans that transfer wealth from young teachers who may teach only a few years to older teachers. Imagine how much more attractive teaching might become to young college graduates if pension contributions were paid instead into 401k plans.

Finally, districts must curb their teacher-hiring binge. Between 1980 and 1990, public school enrollment in the U.S. grew by less than one percent while teacher employment rose by ten percent. Between 1990 and 2000, pupil enrollments grew 14 percent but the teaching workforce expanded by 23 percent. (See Figure 1.) What does it mean to talk about "teacher shortages" while districts are ballooning their teaching workforce at rates far in excess of enrollment growth? If public schools returned to the student-teacher ratio that prevailed in 1980, they would recoup about sixteen percent of their entire payroll, money that they could use to selectively raise the pay of the remaining teachers, thus ending spot shortages and boosting quality. No budget increase would be needed.

Given the bleak budget circumstances now facing most states, legislators face tough spending choices. More money may yet be needed to staff some public school classrooms with able instructors. First, however, districts should be obliged to use their current resources in a more efficient manner, and policy-makers should give them the flexibility to do so. Secretary Paige should keep pushing in that direction.

Michael Podgursky is Middlebush Professor of Economics and Department Chair at the University of Missouri - Columbia.

Several states - Connecticut, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia included - recently announced that they were not yet required to offer supplemental services like tutoring to students in failing schools. Not so, says the U.S. Department of Education: the No Child Left Behind Act requires all schools that have been designated as failing for three years to offer supplemental services to students To read more about the misunderstanding (to give it its most generous interpretation) and the Department's efforts to ensure compliance with the law, see "States Suffer Halting Start on Tutoring," by Eric W. Robelen, Education Week, September 25, 2002

Reporter Joshua Benton describes how principal Nancy Hambrick turned around a failing middle school in Texas in "Principal demands perfection, gets it," The Dallas Morning News, September 29, 2002. But it can work the other way, too. After the last in a string of popular principals retired, top-scoring P.S. 87 in Manhattan struggled when it was assigned an interim principal with no leadership experience and a tin ear, according to reporter Katherine Marsh in "Fingers Crossed," The New York Times, September 29, 2002.

While Education Secretary Rod Paige and the National Commission for Teaching and America's Future battle over whether traditional teacher education and state certification guarantee teacher quality, Martin Haberman contends that both sides are missing the point. To find teachers who will help poor children, Haberman says, we must identify individuals who not only know their subjects but also have personal qualities that will allow them to succeed in dysfunctional schools ruled by unhelpful bureaucracies. For more see "Who Is and Isn't Qualified to Teach?" by an anonymous Washington Post staff writer (Some Post reporters are withholding bylines this week as part of a pseudo-strike), The Washington Post, October 1, 2002.

Educational psychologists report a big increase in demand by middle class parents for diagnoses that will allow their teenage sons and daughters to receive extra time to take the SAT, particularly in well-off communities, now that the College Board is no longer "flagging" the scores of students who take the test under special conditions. See "Paying for a Disability Diagnosis to Gain Time on College Boards," by Jane Gross, The New York Times, September 26, 2002

While most special ed experts believe that including learning disabled children in regular classrooms is ideal, try telling that to parents whose kids attend the Lab School in Washington, DC. Each year, 400 applicants vie for 40 spots at this privately operated school, where all 310 students suffer from moderate to severe learning disabilities. Using many imaginative, hands-on activities, the innovative school teaches coping strategies that allow most kids to return to regular schools after three to four years, and 90 percent of its students eventually go to college. A typical teacher in the school may have three assistants - for a class of 11 kids - and tuition is $18,000 a year, but for 80 percent of the school's students, tuition is covered by a combination of district, state, and federal money, thanks to IDEA. Last year, the District of Columbia school system paid the Lab School $4.3 million for Washington youngsters enrolled there. If DC ever succeeds in fixing its severely troubled special ed program, many of these students would be obliged to return to regular public schools and receive their special ed services there. For now, though, the lucky few enjoy a world-class education, while many more of the District's disabled kids simply do without. A 10-page portrait of the Lab School, considered one of the best in the land for learning disabled kids, and its colorful and demanding principal Sally Smith, appears in this month's Teacher Magazine. "Stepping Out of the Mainstream," by Stacy Weiner, Teacher Magazine, October 2002

United States General Accounting Office
September 2002

Studies of privately funded voucher programs "provide some evidence that African American students who used vouchers to attend private schools showed greater improvements in math and reading than students in the comparison group, and have also found that the parents of voucher users of all racial and ethnic groups were consistently more satisfied with their children's education than parents of comparison group students." So reports the federal government's General Accounting Office (GAO) in its new review of the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs. That vouchers help African-American children academically will come as no surprise to anyone who has read early research on this topic, especially that of Paul Peterson and colleagues. In fact, much of the data reported on by the GAO comes directly out of that research. This analysis by the government's independent accounting arm adds to the legitimacy of that research. Are privately funded vouchers (a.k.a. scholarships) a panacea for all that ails urban education in America? No. But such programs provide a significant tool in the struggle to improve educational opportunities for children in some of the country's most dysfunctional school systems. We note that the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has donated about $2 million to such a scholarship program in Dayton, Ohio since 1998. In Dayton, the GAO notes, African-American voucher users showed improvement in reading, but the study in Dayton did not reach the 95 percent confidence level (the gold standard) for determining an effect to be significant. (It did reach a 90 percent confidence level, as previously reported by Peterson's team, meaning there is 90 percent certainty that these reading gains did not occur by chance.) According to the GAO, the New York study was more reliable; it shows "positive and statistically significant differences on reading, math, and composite test scores between African American voucher users and the control (no voucher) group." One interesting question raised by the New York study - as well as the Washington and Dayton studies - is why voucher programs help African American students improve academically but don't seem to have much effect on other children. The GAO report does not explain, but this is a question worth exploring further. This report will not end the voucher debate but it should encourage further experimentation with private scholarships and research on their long-term effects. To see for yourself, surf to http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02752.pdf.

Christopher Barnes, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute
September 2002

NAEP results, combined with state tests, give us a pretty good idea how well (or poorly) our students and schools are performing. But how well, and precisely what, are our teachers teaching? To find out, the Manhattan Institute commissioned the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis to survey a national sample of fourth and eighth grade teachers. Teachers of those grades - chosen both because they are two grades for which we have NAEP data and because they mark the end of "primary" and "middle" schooling - were asked about their "teaching philosophies, their classroom teaching methods and practices, their academic expectations for their students, and their opinions on other issues of education policy." The results are both fascinating and alarming. In the report's foreword, our own (and formerly Manhattan's own) Chester Finn highlights five findings that are "particularly vexing because of the chasm they display between the views of teachers and the expectations of [standards-based] reformers": "First, a majority of teachers in both fourth and eighth grade opt for 'student-directed learning' rather than 'teacher-directed learning.' & Second, three quarters of teachers have embraced the college-of-education dogma that the purpose of schooling is to help youngsters "learn how to learn" rather than to acquire specific information and skills. & Third, not even two out of five teachers in fourth grade base their students' grades primarily on a "single, class-wide standard," while the majority place heavier emphasis on individual children's abilities. & Fourth, teachers do not seem to have terribly high expectations for their pupils when it comes to how much and how well they will end up learning. & Finally, and most bluntly, one third of fourth grade teachers and 30 percent of eight grade teachers do not agree that 'a teacher's role is primarily to help students learn the things that your state or community has decided students should know.'" Given that No Child Left Behind is now the law of the land, all who have a stake in its implementation will want to read this report to gain a better understanding of the challenges ahead in getting teachers (and ed schools) to buy into standards-based reform. You'll find this report on the web at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/cr_28.pdf.

Lance T. Izumi with K. Gwynne Coburn and Matt Cox, Pacific Research Institute
September 2002

Following the lead of the Heritage Foundation's No Excuses project, which identified high-performing schools that defy the demographic odds, Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute has analyzed successful high-poverty schools in the Golden State. Izumi interviewed the principals of eight California elementary schools - all with at least eighty percent of their students on the government-subsidized free lunch program - that fared well on the state's academic performance index, which is based on their scores on the Stanford 9 and the California Standards Test in English Language Arts. The report profiles each school, identifying those factors that its principal thought were integral to the school's success. Contrary to the child-centered approach taught in most ed schools, these principals report that teacher-directed instruction played a key role in the success of their schools. The principals all supported Open Court, a phonics-based program for the instruction of reading, and many principals pointed to the availability of a full or part time reading specialist or coach as important support for the teachers. The principals also universally supported the setting of goals in order to meet state academic standards, the use of frequent testing to measure student progress in this regard, and the need for regular standards-based professional development, particularly if it emphasizes collaboration among the teachers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the principals were ambivalent about the requirement that teachers be certified, stating that their teachers with emergency certification often performed as well or better than those who had gone through the conventional certification process. The report is available at http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/educat/they_have_overcome.pdf.

Michael DeArmond, Sara Taggart and Paul Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington
May 2002

This 28-page contribution by the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education, also supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, examines five education trends and their implications for school buildings and other facilities. It offers six criteria for making decisions about facilities. And it closes with case studies of two communities (Portland, Oregon and Niagara Falls City) that have done well at devising smart ways to handle their facilities challenges. You can find a copy at http://www.aecf.org/publications/data/facilities.pdf or http://www.crpe.org/Publications/downloads/report_facilitiesweb.pdf.

Michael deCourcy Hinds, Carnegie Corporation of New York
2002

Michael deCourcy Hinds wrote this 17-pager as part of the "Carnegie Challenge 2002" series, intended by the Carnegie Corporation of New York "to lift up ideas and issues in a way that we hope will elevate them to the national agenda." This one wants the national agenda to begin treating teachers "as modern clinical professionals." It's based on Carnegie's assumption (built into its multi-million dollar "Teachers for a New Era" initiative) that the way to do this is by transforming colleges of education into "schools of modern clinical practice." The basic strategy is to solve America's teacher quality problem by fixing its ed schools - which Carnegie seeks to do by pumping money into them. Two-year "residency" programs for new teachers are a key element of this strategy, as Carnegie continues its decades-old effort to make teaching more professional by making it more like medicine. Though the foundation can legitimately claim some ancient credit for having helped to strengthen medical education in America, by supporting Abraham Flexner's influential 1910 critique of medical schools, it remains to be seen whether this can be done for a field that rests so lightly on science and so heavily on hunch, ideology and preference. Flexner, it may be recalled, wrote that "...The curse of medical education is the excessive number of schools. The situation can improve only as weaker and superfluous schools are extinguished." That is surely not Carnegie's view, at least not its public view, of teacher education. We wish them well, though. It's surely worth trying multiple routes to better teachers in U.S. primary-secondary schools. We wish, however, that the Carnegie crowd were more tolerant of those who would try different routes-and committed to having their programs evaluated by people who don't start off with a predisposition to like them. You can find this paper on the web at http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/teachered.pdf.

National Archives and the National History Day
September 2002

To commemorate the 215th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, President Bush last month unveiled a three-pronged initiative to increase American students' and the general public's understanding of American history. One part - the National Endowment for the Humanities' "We the People" project - was described in last week's Gadfly. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=40#590.) The second part of the initiative is "Our Documents," a special web site (located at www.OurDocuments.gov) launched by the National Archives and intended, says the President, to "bring one hundred of America's most important documents from the National Archives to classrooms and communities across the country." The website boasts a list of "Milestone Documents" that include classics like the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Articles of Confederation (1777), as well as less celebrated documents such as the Treaty of Paris (1783). There are more modern additions as well, including Executive Order 10730: Desegregation of Central High School (1957) and the Test Ban Treaty (1963), with many more to come. But this project isn't just for history buffs; it also offers students awards and scholarships, provides supplemental information and lesson plans for teachers, and sponsors competitions, contests and discussions about important events in American history. See http://www.OurDocuments.gov.
NB: The third component of the President's initiative to combat historical illiteracy is a "We the People" Forum to be convened by the White House in February 2003. It is intended to address ways to improve the teaching of American history and civics in schools and universities. According to President Bush, "the primary responsibility for teaching history and civics rests with our elementary and secondary schools, and they've got to do their job. The federal government can help." Hopefully the forum - which will take shape in the coming months - will rally educators to strengthen their students' understanding and appreciation of U.S. history.

Robin Lake, Abigail Winger and Jeff Petty, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of Washington
May 2002

The University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education recently published this useful hundred-page guide to starting new schools. Funded (in part) by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the guide helps would-be school founders think through their legal options, test their market, assemble a leadership team, follow the crumbs through the political maze, develop the academic program, recruit students, work with parents and more, including such mundane but crucial items as getting liability insurance and managing the office. This will prove a valuable resource for anyone considering the creation of a charter school or similar program. You can obtain a copy by surfing to http://www.aecf.org/publications/data/newschoolshdbk.pdf or http://www.crpe.org/Publications/downloads/report_handbookweb.pdf.

Valerie E. Lee and David Burkam, Economic Policy Institute
September 2002

This hundred-page book from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute was written by Valerie E. Lee and David Burkam of the University of Michigan. Their main thesis: due to socio-economic and family factors, low-income (and, disproportionately, minority) youngsters are already behind the 8-ball, educationally speaking, upon arrival in kindergarten. Then they enter inferior schools, which worsens academic inequality. (The database is the U.S. Education Department's "early childhood longitudinal study.") What to do about this unhappy tangle? Definitely not vouchers or school choice, say the authors. They edge up to but cannot bring themselves to recommend public-policy involvement in family structure. This leaves them with the usual recommendations: more and better pre-school, more equitable distribution of technology, better public schools and something called "more equitable distribution of children across public schools," which appears to mean involuntary integration. Overall, it's one of those studies that does a far better job of documenting a familiar problem than at shedding new light on possible solutions. The ISBN is 1932066020. For more information, see http://www.epinet.org/books/starting_gate.html.