The Education Gadfly Weekly

February 2008
EFF Films

The film's title is Flunked, but that's misleading. It spends far less time dwelling on bad U.S. schools than featuring the good ones. This movie will not teach ed policy analysts much that's new; it is meant to introduce rather than dissect some of the most successful educational approaches being tried around the country. Headlining the tour are Ben Chavis, founder of the American Indian Public Charter School, and Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools. Both speak with conviction about the importance of strong leadership, high-quality teaching and curricula, and high standards. The film's sweeping pans of orderly classrooms, with narrator Joe Mantegna (that's Joey Zaza to fans of Godfather Part III) telling tales of sky-rocketing test scores, are clear evidence that the featured schools, most of them charters, are doing something right. The film tries to explain their success by providing some basics on free-market principles; Cato scholar Andrew Coulson is interviewed, for example. But it doesn't dig deep enough to reveal precisely what makes the schools profiled so different from their regular district counterparts. It's not necessarily a knock on the film, which lasts only 45 minutes. The producers knew they'd have to paint in broad strokes. It would be nice, though, to see someone document in stark detail the contrasts between thriving charter schools and failing district schools. Nonetheless, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which made the film, deserves praise for its fine product. Check out Flunked at flunkedthemovie.com.

Nancy Kober, Naomi Chudowsky, Victor Chudowsky
Center on Education Policy
June 2008

The Center on Education Policy's latest report gives a decisive "yes" to the question in its title. Using state test and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data since the implementation of NCLB, CEP found upward trends in reading and math in lots of states and plenty of evidence of a narrowing achievement gap. The percentage of students reaching proficiency in math made "moderate-to-large" gains in 21 states at the elementary level and in 22 states at the middle-school level. High-school gains were fewer: just twelve jurisdictions. Reading achievement was similar but not weaker, with 17 states bettering their performance at the elementary level and eight at the high school level. Of course, a lot of states aren't making any statistically significant gains and progress on NAEP tends to be much more modest than on state tests. CEP also offers possible explanations for the trends it found, the most notable of which is that "subtle manipulations" may have been made in test design (e.g. easier questions, changing proportions of hard and easy questions, different blends of sub-topics covered). We reacted similarly two weeks ago when New York reported sudden dramatic gains in its test scores. Evidence continues to arrive that state results are better on the state's own tests. Unfortunately, changes in test design are hard to document and vary from state-to-state (a problem explored in our Proficiency Illusion report). Here's another concern: "proficiency" is defined at such a low level in so many states (also explored in the Proficiency Illusion) that "increasing student achievement" often amounts to getting more kids over a very low bar. It certainly doesn't mean that the broad student population is making progress--not to mention students at the top. CEP's report does show signs of "progress," but let's acknowledge the limits of that good news.

Must've been a slow day at the G-8 Summit. The Washington Post reports, on A1, that "Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time" at Thomas Jefferson High School (colloquially known as T.J.) in Fairfax County, Virginia. Some fret that the highly selective school, which garnered the top spot in U.S. News & World Report's 2007 high school rankings, suffers from insufficient diversity--a mere 2 percent of this year's T.J. class is African American or Hispanic. In 2004, the Fairfax County School Board put in place a T.J. admissions policy that took race into account as a "plus factor" but not a determining factor (whatever that means), and yet the number of Asian students accepted continues to rise and the number of Hispanic and black students remains low. Here's a thought: Who cares? T.J. is an academically selective school, and its enrollment reveals what NAEP scores and SAT and ACT data have long shown. Asian American and white students tend to do better academically than black and Hispanic students, for a number of varied and complicated reasons. We won't create a brighter American future by hurting high achievers and socially engineering their schools. The job of Fairfax school officials, and those in the other T.J. feeder systems is to educate their black and Hispanic pupils so well in grades K-8 that they're truly competitive when it comes to T.J. admissions.

"At Magnet School, An Asian Plurality," by Michael Alison Chandler, Washington Post, July 7, 2008

That's the message South Carolina is sending to undocumented students now that it's become the first state in the nation to bar illegal immigrants from attending its public colleges and universities. What a startling disconnect between that state's k-12 system--which, because of a 1982 Supreme Court decision, must educate all students who show up in its classes--and its higher education system. Concern about America's out-of-control borders is not ill-founded, of course, but it's difficult to envision a more punitive and ineffective solution to the problem than the one South Carolina has embraced. Nor one more damaging to the long-term prospects of illegal immigrants becoming useful, productive, law-abiding, and tax-paying residents. Public policy should encourage all children to fulfill their potential, not force those whose parents broke the law to hide in the shadows of our society. On this point, California and the nine other states that provide in-state tuition to all students graduating from their public high schools have it right. And South Carolina has it so very, very wrong.

"Illegal immigrants face threat of no college," by Mary Beth Marklein, USA Today, July 7, 2008

"Undocumented students have a degree of anxiety," by Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2009

Watching the "Capitol Fourth" concert and ensuing fireworks on TV the other evening, four-year-old granddaughter in my arms, I grew as misty, sentimental, and patriotic as I usually do on America's birthday (which happens also be be little Emma's "half-birthday"). The next morning, however, I awoke with my ever-more-frequent sense of foreboding about the nation's future.

Temperamentally, I'm no pessimist and civically I've never been a "declinist." But I do begin to see parallels between America's present condition and Rome circa 350 A.D.

Terrorists bent on killing us is part of the problem, of course, and a faltering economy doesn't help. While I know the business cycle will eventually turn upward again, I can't but worry about the core strength of an economy in which Starbucks is now worth twice as much as General Motors. Frappuccinos aren't very powerful weapons against Al Qaeda.

Starbucks, in a way, symbolizes both the best of American ingenuity and entrepreneurialism and the hedonistic, live-for-today, save-not-for-tomorrow, bread-and-circuses "life-style" that gives me pause about the future. So does the near-total inability of our government to tackle in any serious way the major challenges facing the country. (I've hung around Washington for the better part of four decades and have never seen so total a breakdown of competence, will and common purpose. Consider, just for starters: immigration, Medicare, Darfur, national debt, NCLB, climate change, Tibet, infrastructure.) So does the substitution of trashy celebrity "news" for hard news in one paper after another. (That's what sells, say publishers, as they lay off reporters.) So does the fact that nobody I know under 30 much bothers either with newspapers or radio/TV news. The oddments of current affairs that they pick up arrive via internet and, increasingly, the "blogosphere," which is more about feelings and opinions than basic information or sustained analysis. But the oddments grow fewer as the iPod ear-buds never leave their ears and the self-absorption mounts.

And then there's the profound question of whether we're one nation or many. When you fixate long enough on oneself, on "diversity" and on "sensitivity," what makes us different from each another eventually trumps what makes us similar. Political correctness and partisanship eventually trump functional politics--the kind by which hard decisions actually get made by voting, compromising, then voting again, usually with the help of what we once called "leadership." Advancing the interests of groups eventually trumps the common weal. (Washington now contains some 35,000 registered lobbyists--that's 65 per member of Congress--and most of them have plenty of bread and enjoy lots of circuses.)

The Bradley Project on America's National Identity released its sobering but insightful E Pluribus Unum report last month. You can find it here; press coverage here (including a semi-contentious column by David Broder and terrific blog posts by Pete Wehner in Commentary and Ross Douthat in The Atlantic Monthly); and several background essays (see the beauty by John McWhorter) here.

I wish the current presidential race had more discussion of national identity and fewer volleys about the candidates' "patriotism." Douthat is right in saying that the Bradley report is one McCain should read--and so should Obama. It goes to the core of what sort of country America is and ought to be.

Gadfly readers and educationists ought to acquaint themselves in particular with its chapter on "A Shared History" and how to teach this (pp. 23-30) and with the discussion of "overcoming separatism" in our educational institutions (pp. 35-6). The latter also holds a particularly perplexing (if unstated) challenge for school-choice devotees, forcing them (okay, us) to ponder the e pluribus unum tension of enabling schools to be different and families to select among them, yet expecting all of them to forge Americans with shared civic values, history, culture and more.

This problem is not to be avoided. We're all for schools that differ in curricular focus ("science and math" vs. "art and music," etc.); in pedagogical style (constructivist vs. instructivist, etc.); in educational mission ("dropout recovery" vs., say, college-bound); even in religious affiliation (Catholic or Jewish, Lutheran or, I guess, Muslim). We want families to be free, indeed aided, to choose among them on any number of grounds (escaping from failed schools, a better fit between kid and school, a quest for character or religious formation, maximizing a child's prospects of college admission, etc.) We're developing scads of mechanisms for accomplishing this--charters, vouchers, tax credits, virtual schools, magnets, hybrids, and on and on.

But what, then, do the schools have in common and how confident can we be that they'll contribute at least as much to unum as to pluribus? What if parents seeking out schools attended by kids who resemble their own children leads to further division of Americans by race, ethnicity or religion? Will we in time boast Democratic and Republican schools? Red and blue schools? "Right to life" and "right to choose" schools?

The Bradley report is thoughtful about curriculum--an unum curriculum, particularly in history and civics--and well-wrought, statewide academic standards joined to well-wrought and forceful state testing-and-accountability mechanisms can go far to ensure that the curricular core is similar if not identical in all schools. (How that may apply to private schools and voucher-carrying kids is a tough question in its own right that we've begun to wrestle with in a future Fordham report.) A similar academic curriculum does not, however, ensure that kids will acquire similar civic values or take the unum seriously. Much of that needs to come from home and the broader culture or it may not come at all.

The Bradley report is wise about this, too, but far from cheery. Which, alas, returns me to my larger angst about America's current condition and prospects. Will our leaders lead--or simply score political points? Will we look at each other and see fellow citizens or alien populations? Will Starbucks become our most important company? Will baristas replace aerospace engineers? Will anybody save for tomorrow or will we spend all our bread on today's circuses? Who is focusing on the future?

Michelle Rhee wants to pay teachers in Washington, D.C., close to $131,000 a year--but there's a catch. To make the big bucks, educators will have to sacrifice job security. The D.C. schools chancellor has proposed to establish two pay tiers, red and green. (Good idea.) Green-level teachers would see extra green (initially provided by private organizations such as the Gates Foundation) for ceding their seniority and tenure rights and submitting to yearly evaluations that judge them largely by student test scores. Red-level educators would stick to the single-salary schedule, which rewards experience and not performance but pays less. An unnamed union representative told the Washington Post that teachers will never go for the green: "You may be trading off your future, your tenure, your job security. When you trade that, it seems to me you're not getting much." Not getting much? What about getting an increased sense of professionalism and a much higher salary? The Washington Post reported that the Washington Teachers' Union is open to the idea, which is fantastic, even if their national counterparts are far less agreeable on this point. As for Rhee: nice work, chancellor, yet again.

"Rhee Seeks Tenure-Pay Swap for Teachers," by V. Dion Haynes, Washington Post, July 3, 2008

"Reform With Rewards," Washington Post editorial, July 8, 2008

By all means spare yourself the burden of reading, as I did this week in the esteemed National Review Online, that criticizing sneaky attempts to undermine evolution in k-12 science class is somehow akin to promoting eugenics.

John G. West of the Discovery Institute (home of most of the misguided intelligence behind the Intelligent Design campaign), a self-styled "contrarian" and a political scientist, not a natural scientist, took to NRO to defend Louisiana's new Science Education Act, signed late last month by that state's generally savvy governor, Bobby Jindal. That measure allows teachers to introduce into their science classes supplemental material that will supposedly rev the kids' "critical thinking" and foster "an open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning."

West has a grandiose view of the type of critical discussion that such supplements will stir in the minds of elementary and secondary school pupils, far too many of whom can scarcely read and few of whom could construct a coherent paragraph differentiating James Madison from James Bond. But no matter, says West--now that Louisiana finally offers to its science teachers the protection they've long craved from academic oppression, the discussional atmosphere will flourish.

Where, one wonders, are these oppressed teachers who until now have been browbeaten or cowed from communicating objective scientific information to their charges? West identifies none in his piece, and when the Discovery Institute, which has had its fingers in similar bills around the country, was asked that very question several months ago by Florida reporters, it named no names.

What failed in five other states (Alabama, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, and South Carolina) but passed in Louisiana is a legislative cure to a problem that doesn't exist. These are not modern-day, k-12 Galileos who fought for the Science Education Act; they are closer to modern-day Savonarolas in disguise.

The Discovery Institute, having watched Intelligent Design run into a vexing obstacle when a (devout Christian) judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, ruled in 2005 that ID "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," has lately taken a different tack. Which is why West has draped his organization's true goal of undermining evolution in fashionable "academic freedom" garb, and why the Discovery Institute has thusly paraded it to state legislators.

To that end, West writes that "in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education." And in "this environment of politically correct science, thoughtful teachers who want to acquaint their students with dissenting views and conflicting evidence can expect to run afoul of the thought police." (Italics mine.)

Of course, it is West's preferred scientific theory that is propagandistically propagated in schools. Neither he nor his organization gives any credence to evolution, which every serious scientist accepts as the cornerstone of modern biology. West and the Discovery Institute, by contrast, offer only unscientific doubt.

As for the eugenics canard, West asserts that it was the public's uncritical fealty to scientists working to "keep us from sinning against Darwin's law of natural selection," that led to the forcible sterilization of 60,000 Americans. Therefore, he writes, we must allow for "scientific inquiry" about evolution in k-12 classes or risk embracing all sorts of similarly noxious practices (like, psst, even more eugenics!).

What bosh. We haven't the space to list all the obvious reasons why this analogy is junk much less to investigate the more nuanced ones. But West's scare-tactic deserves a response similar to that garnered by promoters of Ben Stein's film Expelled, who chose to push their product by drawing overblown correlations between the teaching of evolution in science classes and Nazis.

Bottom line, beyond West's awful article, is that Louisiana's talented new governor and its legislators have embarrassed themselves and their state by passing a transparently deceptive law that will surely undermine science education in the bayou.

February 2008
EFF Films

The film's title is Flunked, but that's misleading. It spends far less time dwelling on bad U.S. schools than featuring the good ones. This movie will not teach ed policy analysts much that's new; it is meant to introduce rather than dissect some of the most successful educational approaches being tried around the country. Headlining the tour are Ben Chavis, founder of the American Indian Public Charter School, and Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools. Both speak with conviction about the importance of strong leadership, high-quality teaching and curricula, and high standards. The film's sweeping pans of orderly classrooms, with narrator Joe Mantegna (that's Joey Zaza to fans of Godfather Part III) telling tales of sky-rocketing test scores, are clear evidence that the featured schools, most of them charters, are doing something right. The film tries to explain their success by providing some basics on free-market principles; Cato scholar Andrew Coulson is interviewed, for example. But it doesn't dig deep enough to reveal precisely what makes the schools profiled so different from their regular district counterparts. It's not necessarily a knock on the film, which lasts only 45 minutes. The producers knew they'd have to paint in broad strokes. It would be nice, though, to see someone document in stark detail the contrasts between thriving charter schools and failing district schools. Nonetheless, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which made the film, deserves praise for its fine product. Check out Flunked at flunkedthemovie.com.

Nancy Kober, Naomi Chudowsky, Victor Chudowsky
Center on Education Policy
June 2008

The Center on Education Policy's latest report gives a decisive "yes" to the question in its title. Using state test and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data since the implementation of NCLB, CEP found upward trends in reading and math in lots of states and plenty of evidence of a narrowing achievement gap. The percentage of students reaching proficiency in math made "moderate-to-large" gains in 21 states at the elementary level and in 22 states at the middle-school level. High-school gains were fewer: just twelve jurisdictions. Reading achievement was similar but not weaker, with 17 states bettering their performance at the elementary level and eight at the high school level. Of course, a lot of states aren't making any statistically significant gains and progress on NAEP tends to be much more modest than on state tests. CEP also offers possible explanations for the trends it found, the most notable of which is that "subtle manipulations" may have been made in test design (e.g. easier questions, changing proportions of hard and easy questions, different blends of sub-topics covered). We reacted similarly two weeks ago when New York reported sudden dramatic gains in its test scores. Evidence continues to arrive that state results are better on the state's own tests. Unfortunately, changes in test design are hard to document and vary from state-to-state (a problem explored in our Proficiency Illusion report). Here's another concern: "proficiency" is defined at such a low level in so many states (also explored in the Proficiency Illusion) that "increasing student achievement" often amounts to getting more kids over a very low bar. It certainly doesn't mean that the broad student population is making progress--not to mention students at the top. CEP's report does show signs of "progress," but let's acknowledge the limits of that good news.