The Education Gadfly Weekly

Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute
2004

Nobody who followed Richard Rothstein's columns in the New York Times or his earlier work on education will be surprised that his new book ascribes most of the black-white achievement gap to social class and economics. In effect, he devotes this book to affirming Coleman's 1964 finding that school differences have far less impact on achievement differences than do family characteristics, of which, Rothstein says, socio-economic status is the mightiest. He insists that contemporary school reforms cannot overcome that influence and therefore urges (if the country is serious about gap-closing) that we focus more on equalizing income, housing, health care and suchlike. Indeed, Rothstein states, "If the nation can't close the gaps in income, health, and housing, there is little prospect of equalizing achievement." He also tries to debunk some well-known examples of schools and educators that succeed with disadvantaged minority youngsters. He deprecates claims made by, among others, the Heritage Foundation, the Education Trust, KIPP academies, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, and Jaime Escalante's biographers, insisting either that the achievements don't amount to much or couldn't be replicated or that the schools engage in cream-skimming. The book, therefore, seeks to throw ice water on just about every popular form of contemporary school-centered reform, although Rothstein cuts some slack for (high quality) pre-school programs, extended-day and summer programs; mainly because they help to supply poor kids with some of the advantages more commonly associated with middle-class children.

Rothstein does not hesitate to gore left as well as right. He warns, for example, that today's spate of "adequacy lawsuits" seeking to reshape school finance by getting judges to force states to spend enough on public education to provide everyone with "adequate" schooling, runs a risk of over promising, since these suits, too, bank on the capacity of better-resourced schools to close today's learning gaps.

Is he right? Do we quit trying to fix the schools we've got for the kids we've got while we wait for radical social changes to be made? Is this not a counsel of despair that plays right into the tendency of some educators to say "We're doing all that should be expected of us, given the kids we're being sent from the homes they're being sent from, so stop demanding more from us?"

Readers may also wish to read an important new essay by sociologist George Farkas, which says the black-white test score gap is caused, more than any other thing, by divergent child-rearing practices (and pre-school opportunities). Yes, these, too, are linked to social class, but much could be done, Farkas says, to overcome them and reduce the gap by ensuring that Head Start and other preschool programs are academically strong and widely used. Farkas doesn't exactly contradict Rothstein but he offers a more hopeful and actionable scenario instead of, in effect, suggesting that we sit on our hands until the Promised Land arrives.

The ISNB for Rothstein's book is 1932066098 and you can learn more about it by clicking here.  Farkas's article, published in the May 2004 issue of Contexts, can be purchased by clicking here.

Center on Education Policy
May 2004

The Center on Education Policy is the source of this 130-page report, which says that high-stakes exit exams from high schools are not a low-cost education reform even if the tests themselves don't carry fat price tags. The point is that it costs money to provide extra academic help to students to boost the odds of their passing the exams. And that's surely true so long as one takes a remedial model for granted, i.e. assumes that the schools can't or won't do it right the first time around and will thus continue to let lots of kids make it to the stage of exit test-taking without having been properly educated. At that point, states and schools will indeed incur remedial costs-which this report takes for granted-or will face what may be politically and morally unacceptable levels of exam failure and diploma denial. The report is based on studies of the costs of exam preparation in three states: Indiana, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. These costs turn out to vary greatly-from $171 per student per year to $557, though even the high figure strikes me as a bargain if it means diplomas will (finally) begin to connote real achievement. The CEP authors also extract some (fairly obvious) lessons for policy makers, including starting out with as tough an exam as one wants to end up with rather than raising the bar along the way, and (of course) focusing on early detection and remediation of student problems. You can find it online here.

General Accounting Office
May 2004

The GAO issued a report this week that says what Gadfly has long been saying - that NCLB cannot be an "unfunded mandate" because it is not, in fact, a mandate. Though GAO used what People for the American Way calls a "complicated legal definition" of mandates, the point is well made and well taken: NCLB is not an unfunded mandate because its "requirements were a condition of federal financial assistance," i.e. not an absolute requirement of federal law (like paying your taxes). Though PFAW concedes that GAO is technically right, it grumbles that "to meet NCLB requirements, states are forced to use their own state and local funds. If states do not abide by NCLB requirements, they will be denied the resources they need to keep educating children." Whatever. Certainly the report confirms that states cannot both have their cake (the Title 1 money) and eat it (not be held accountable to anyone for academic achievement). To see for yourself, visit this link.

"Education law deemed no mandate," by George Archibald, Washington Times, June 1, 2004," http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040601-122115-1993r.htm

"Paige parses words while states and schools struggle," People for the American Way, May 28, 2004, http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=15749

Robert Holland and Don Soifer, Lexington Institute
April 2004

Rewarding teachers with better pay based on performance rather than seniority is often derided as "utopian." But a teacher pay scheme in Chattanooga, Tennessee - one of six reform programs profiled in this Lexington Institute study - brings quality teachers to underperforming inner city schools by doing just that. Under the leadership of Mayor Bob Corker, a coalition of community groups and businesses banded together to provide bonuses for high performing teachers if they 1) relocate to low-performing schools and 2) are able to significantly improve the academic gains made by students in those schools. The study's authors also summarize other grassroots reforms such as Florida's tax credit scholarship program, which has enhanced school choice and saved the state millions of dollars, and Colorado's school report cards, which offer accessible and comprehensive information for parents concerning school performance. All in all, a nice summary of promising practices worth repeating elsewhere. Click here to view the report.  

In American K-12 education, right now, the wind is just beginning to pick up and Ma and Pa are hustling the kids into the cellar. A twister's coming, and its name is No Child Left Behind.

Those who have followed the education debate over the past two years might be forgiven for wondering: how can anyone possibly think this debate is going to get more ferocious? After all, NCLB has generated enough heat and light over the past two years (and especially in the past 12 months) to last a lifetime.

Yet what's coming could make the debates of the past few months seem as tame as a Ladies' Sodality. This summer, it is widely expected, thousands of schools will be labeled "in need of improvement" when their 2004 state test results roll in. These schools will likely represent a cross-section of American K-12 education - urban schools, yes, but also well-heeled suburban schools, rural districts, and everybody in between.

So it is that in the past few weeks, schools and districts - abetted by members of the media who may be constitutionally anti-testing but mostly crave a good story - have begun to work feverishly to distract the public from the funnel clouds on the horizon. The plan, clearly, is to discredit the coming reports by launching a preemptive attack on the foundations and procedures of the law itself - and just maybe land a blow or two on the Bush administration in the process.

One example: a recent series of articles on testing in the Dayton Daily News. (We highlight this series not just because of Fordham's long roots in Dayton but because it's an especially egregious example of its genre.) There is a formula to writing such stories, a series of journalistic tropes that are essential to creating the proper atmosphere of hysteria. I know these secrets, as I was formerly a practitioner of the black art of journalism myself. The DDN articles exhibit all the standard symptoms of self-righteous hyperbole that characterize much NCLB reporting. To wit:

Start with a tearjerker. Testing is a subject tailor-made for plucking heartstrings raw. In this case, we hear of "9-year-old honor student" Kylie Miller on her way out the door to retake the Ohio Fourth Grade Proficiency Test, which she had failed on an earlier attempt. "Mom, don't get mad if I fail again," she calls out. "I'm just dumb." Or high school student Tynisha Edmondson, who earned A's in science class yet repeatedly failed her science proficiency exam. What pathos! Nowhere does the Daily News consider the possibility that "honors" students who fail state proficiency exams - exams that other critics say have been "dumbed down" to a laughably easy passing level - may say more about grade inflation than the exams' validity.

Put the most extreme statements in the mouths of others. This is an old journalistic trick, allowing reporters to editorialize second-hand while avoiding overt statements of opinion. Thus, we are subjected to one Doris Nell, chairwoman of the Lebanon High School English Department, who opines of this testing mania, "I think our era will be looked at as a new type of Spanish Inquisition." Ah yes, we overlooked the NCLB thumbscrews-and-iron-maidens budget line! The set-aside for stake-burnings. We're not sure what Ms. Nell's problem with testing is, since her school does reasonably well on Ohio proficiency exams (see this link), though this performance is perhaps made easier by its lack of racial (97 percent white) or socioeconomic (only 5 percent free- or reduced-lunch eligible) diversity. More to the point, she might reflect on the likely fact that few of her students are being graduated as illiterates and that just possibly "the government" wants to do something for the many Ohio kids who are.

Stack the deck with experts. The Daily News trots out a long list of experts with impressive academic sinecures to bash testing. The very few who speak in favor of testing are testing company executives or the Ohio policy makers who wrote the laws the News is criticizing. This stacking of the deck conveys the impression that only people with an interest in the matter support testing. That's simply not true.

Present numbers out of context. The Daily News laments that, due to NCLB-driven testing requirements, "the annual budget for school testing quadrupled in five years, from $18 million to $75 million." It fails to mention that, in fiscal 2003, Ohio spent just under $8 billion on elementary and secondary education, which means the state spent about one percent of its education budget on testing. As Rick Hess notes in his fine recent book, Common Sense School Reform (click here for more information), it is striking that this nation spends so little to ascertain whether its enormous outlays for K-12 education are having any effect. Consider: sectors such as banking and insurance devote upwards of 10 percent of their budgets to collecting and using data to assess performance. Only in education do we show such curious disinterest in ascertaining whether investments are paying off.

Present a smattering of episodes as a nationwide trend. The Daily News informs us that there is "growing evidence" that testing systems are "deeply flawed . . . in how they're constructed, in how they're graded, and in how their results are used." In support of this, reporters muster three grading lapses: in North Carolina, Nevada, and Connecticut. In the last of these, reports were delayed for several months to work out glitches in the grading mechanism. In the other two, a grand total of 749 students in two states received erroneous results. The errors were eventually caught and fixed. The News also reports that a nonsense essay a reporter wrote was determined to be "effective writing" by a computer program that assesses writing samples for the proficiency tests. He has a point here; computer grading isn't a great way to evaluate essays in the first place, at least not yet. And we do not dismiss the possibility of grading errors in standardized testing. That's why good practice includes extensive field-testing and validity assessments. But these incidents do not a nationwide trend make. No one, not even the Daily News, could devise an error-free system. Keep in mind, though, that it's impossible even to appraise the validity of an accountability system that relies solely on teacher-developed tests. In any such system, a student's fate hinges on one person's evaluation of their progress, a judgment that cannot be independently confirmed. The reasonable response to testing's technical glitches is to identify them and work to reduce them - not to junk the process because somewhere, somehow, it may spit out a flawed result.

Demolish distinctions, reduce complexities, and conflate facts. The writing sample mentioned above is not required by NCLB. The science assessment Tynisha Edmondson has trouble passing is not required by NCLB. The state proficiency test system the Daily News opposes, and which has increased Ohio's testing budget, is far more extensive than NCLB requires. Federal law does not, in fact, require that schools be immediately "sanctioned" if they are labeled underperforming. After two years, students have the right to exit, but is that a sanction for the school or an opportunity for children to learn? Years of "needing improvement" pass before district or state is obliged to intervene forcefully in a school's operations. Nor does the Daily News ever mention that - all together now, and for real this time - participation in Title I, the program that NCLB reformed, is voluntary. Much of the controversy over NCLB stems from the fact that the federal government is now requiring something in return for the money it ships to states. This may be inconvenient for the adults in charge of the system, but it hardly constitutes a crime against the Republic.

The Dayton Daily News is not alone in committing these journalistic sins when it comes to testing, standards, and NCLB. Misconceptions about the law are rife, and newspapers have vied to bash it - with the willing help of educators opposed to testing and to all attempts to hold schools and those who work in them to account for their performance. (We loved Doris Nell's remark that she favors "accountability in a general sense." Sort of like original sin, we guess.) But the effect of these attacks on NCLB is pernicious "in a general sense." What will average readers think when they hear, later this summer, that X percent of schools in their state - maybe even their kid's school - has been labeled "in need of improvement"? Well, if they've read the Dayton Daily News series on testing or hundreds of similar articles these past few months, they will likely think, "Why worry? I think I read somewhere that the tests are wrong or flawed, or . . . something. Anyway, my kid's school is just fine. That can't be a tornado siren I hear, right? Because, boy, is it peaceful out, and isn't the sky the most interesting shade of green?"

Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

"Flunking the test," by Mark Fisher and Scott Elliot, Dayton Daily News, May 23, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/localnews/content/localnews/daily/0523testmain.html (registration required)

"Nonhuman factors," by Scott Elliott, Dayton Daily News, May 24, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0524testautoscore.html (registration required)

"Parents question fairness of misleading exams," by Mark Fisher, Dayton Daily News, May 24, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0524testquestion.html (registration required)

"New generation of tests head to schools," by Mark Fisher and Scott Elliot, Dayton Daily News, May 25, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/project/content/project/tests/0525futures.html (registration required)

'DDN' series full of misleading statements," by John Boehner, Dayton Daily News, May 28, 2004, http://www.daytondailynews.com/opinion/content/opinion/daily/0528voicejoboe.html (registration required)

"Superintendent debate: Do we need big tests?" by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, June 1, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6123-2004Jun1.html

In recent weeks, David Steiner, a professor at Boston University, has roiled the ed school world with his article, "Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers: An Analysis of Syllabi from a Sample of America's Schools of Education," published in the recent book A Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom? Steiner's conclusion - that syllabi used in courses in U.S. colleges of education show a marked bias for progressivism and constructivism and shortchange the works of education thinkers like E.D. Hirsch and Diane Ravitch - has sparked howls of protest from ed school profs. Some of the objections are absurd, such as the contention that syllabi don't matter, which raises the question of why professors hand them out. And of course, there are the usual denunciations of politicization and ideological water-carrying and the like. The reaction, we think, shows that Steiner is on to something: a clear effort among ed school faculty to shield their students from viewpoints that challenge regnant pedagogies and education philosophies. You can read Steiner's account of his conclusions and the controversy in the New York Sun, or better yet order the book at this link.

"Tomorrow's teachers," by David M. Steiner, New York Sun, May 27, 2004, http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/05/27&ID=Ar00800

According to the Independent, surveys consistently show that more than 50 percent of British families would like to send their kids to private schools, which cost on average ??7,000 per year, but fewer than 7 percent can actually afford to do so. Does a quality education have to be so expensive? Civitas, a leading British think tank, thinks not and is out to prove it with a chain of "New Model Schools" that will charge only ??3,000 a year. According to Civitas's deputy director, Robert Whelan, the schools are designed to challenge both the public sector, which he argues is failing kids, and the private sector, which he believes is failing parents "by not providing a sufficiently wide range of products." Whelan insists that the curriculum will be rigorous, students will be "reading and adding up after just one year," school discipline policy will be "firm," and the New Model Schools will emphasize music, art, and P.E., subjects that many complain have been squeezed out by the national curriculum. The first school is fully staffed and slated to open in London in September.

"Cut-price private schools set for launch," by Nicolas Pyke, Independent, May 30, 2004, http://education.independent.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=526323

Every teacher has a story about a smart kid who failed because she just refused to do even the bare minimum to pass. Well-intentioned teachers also learn the hard way that lowering expectations and letting shoddy work slide by only makes things worse. The moral is apparently lost, though, on some school districts. Across New York State, districts are enacting policies that give students an automatic minimum grade of 50 for the quarter, regardless of attendance, test scores, class participation, etc. Proponents say the policy will motivate low-achieving students to stay in school and give them a chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps even after abysmal performance in one or more quarters. Unfortunately, the minimum grade policy may do the exact opposite. According to Sally Jo Widmer, president of the Auburn (NY) Teachers Association, "We have students who have successfully completed the first three marking periods and they are, with pen and pencil, calculating how little work they can do and still receive a passing grade." What's worse, some fear that minimum grade policies will exacerbate high-school grade inflation. Once you start giving kids who are doing nothing a 50, how can you justify giving a kid who works extremely hard, but has not mastered the material, the same grade? According to Val Carr, an 11th grade social studies teacher in Syracuse, such fears are already being realized. "[Some] administrators are asking the nontenured teachers to consider bumping [grades] to a 65 in the case of a student who is really trying." Don Little, a social studies teacher in Syracuse, argues rightly that you cannot motivate a student by giving him a grade he doesn't deserve. "A 50 says you're halfway to perfection but that 50 could be a 6. As cold and hard as a 6 is, a 6 tells a parent how little their child is doing."

"Are students getting a free ride?" New York Teacher, June 2, 2004, http://www.nysut.org/newyorkteacher/2003-2004/040602grading.html

Back in January, Todd Oppenheimer published a devastating article on eRate, the federal tax on phone service that funds wiring schools for and to the Internet. Internet access in schools is one of the many techno-utopian ideas that floated around in the go-go 1990s, when every politician worth his salt wanted to give kids "the tools they need to succeed in a rapidly changing global environment," and other assorted blather. In fact, as Oppenheimer pointed out, the program was a mess from the beginning, with accusations that tech companies were enticing schools to buy gobs of soon-to-be-outmoded technology they didn't need. This week, criminal investigations into eRate culminated in an admission of wrongdoing on the part of NEC Business Network Solutions for wire fraud and conspiracy. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to $20 million in fines and restitution. Another company has been charged as well, and a San Francisco school administrator is serving time in jail for accepting bribes to buy technology with a no-bid contract.

"The Internet school scam," by Todd Oppenheimer, The Nation, January 29, 2004, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040216&s=oppenheimer&c=1

Philanthropy magazine has a primer for philanthropists and others on efforts to break the textbook monopoly and inject high-quality, content-rich books into the market. The piece mentions Fordham's report on high school history textbooks (click here for the report) and also such worthy undertakings as the Bible Literacy Project and the environmental sciences efforts of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). But as always, the challenge is dissemination - actually getting textbooks in the hands of teachers, which means bypassing the adoption process that presently reigns in 26 states. Fordham will have more to say on textbook adoption later this summer; in the meantime, read up on what funders are up to in this critical area.

"Glitzy texts, dull students," by Adam Schaeffer, Philanthropy, May/June 2004, http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/magazines/2004/mayjune/textbooks.htm

Center on Education Policy
May 2004

The Center on Education Policy is the source of this 130-page report, which says that high-stakes exit exams from high schools are not a low-cost education reform even if the tests themselves don't carry fat price tags. The point is that it costs money to provide extra academic help to students to boost the odds of their passing the exams. And that's surely true so long as one takes a remedial model for granted, i.e. assumes that the schools can't or won't do it right the first time around and will thus continue to let lots of kids make it to the stage of exit test-taking without having been properly educated. At that point, states and schools will indeed incur remedial costs-which this report takes for granted-or will face what may be politically and morally unacceptable levels of exam failure and diploma denial. The report is based on studies of the costs of exam preparation in three states: Indiana, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. These costs turn out to vary greatly-from $171 per student per year to $557, though even the high figure strikes me as a bargain if it means diplomas will (finally) begin to connote real achievement. The CEP authors also extract some (fairly obvious) lessons for policy makers, including starting out with as tough an exam as one wants to end up with rather than raising the bar along the way, and (of course) focusing on early detection and remediation of student problems. You can find it online here.

General Accounting Office
May 2004

The GAO issued a report this week that says what Gadfly has long been saying - that NCLB cannot be an "unfunded mandate" because it is not, in fact, a mandate. Though GAO used what People for the American Way calls a "complicated legal definition" of mandates, the point is well made and well taken: NCLB is not an unfunded mandate because its "requirements were a condition of federal financial assistance," i.e. not an absolute requirement of federal law (like paying your taxes). Though PFAW concedes that GAO is technically right, it grumbles that "to meet NCLB requirements, states are forced to use their own state and local funds. If states do not abide by NCLB requirements, they will be denied the resources they need to keep educating children." Whatever. Certainly the report confirms that states cannot both have their cake (the Title 1 money) and eat it (not be held accountable to anyone for academic achievement). To see for yourself, visit this link.

"Education law deemed no mandate," by George Archibald, Washington Times, June 1, 2004," http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040601-122115-1993r.htm

"Paige parses words while states and schools struggle," People for the American Way, May 28, 2004, http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=15749

Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute
2004

Nobody who followed Richard Rothstein's columns in the New York Times or his earlier work on education will be surprised that his new book ascribes most of the black-white achievement gap to social class and economics. In effect, he devotes this book to affirming Coleman's 1964 finding that school differences have far less impact on achievement differences than do family characteristics, of which, Rothstein says, socio-economic status is the mightiest. He insists that contemporary school reforms cannot overcome that influence and therefore urges (if the country is serious about gap-closing) that we focus more on equalizing income, housing, health care and suchlike. Indeed, Rothstein states, "If the nation can't close the gaps in income, health, and housing, there is little prospect of equalizing achievement." He also tries to debunk some well-known examples of schools and educators that succeed with disadvantaged minority youngsters. He deprecates claims made by, among others, the Heritage Foundation, the Education Trust, KIPP academies, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, and Jaime Escalante's biographers, insisting either that the achievements don't amount to much or couldn't be replicated or that the schools engage in cream-skimming. The book, therefore, seeks to throw ice water on just about every popular form of contemporary school-centered reform, although Rothstein cuts some slack for (high quality) pre-school programs, extended-day and summer programs; mainly because they help to supply poor kids with some of the advantages more commonly associated with middle-class children.

Rothstein does not hesitate to gore left as well as right. He warns, for example, that today's spate of "adequacy lawsuits" seeking to reshape school finance by getting judges to force states to spend enough on public education to provide everyone with "adequate" schooling, runs a risk of over promising, since these suits, too, bank on the capacity of better-resourced schools to close today's learning gaps.

Is he right? Do we quit trying to fix the schools we've got for the kids we've got while we wait for radical social changes to be made? Is this not a counsel of despair that plays right into the tendency of some educators to say "We're doing all that should be expected of us, given the kids we're being sent from the homes they're being sent from, so stop demanding more from us?"

Readers may also wish to read an important new essay by sociologist George Farkas, which says the black-white test score gap is caused, more than any other thing, by divergent child-rearing practices (and pre-school opportunities). Yes, these, too, are linked to social class, but much could be done, Farkas says, to overcome them and reduce the gap by ensuring that Head Start and other preschool programs are academically strong and widely used. Farkas doesn't exactly contradict Rothstein but he offers a more hopeful and actionable scenario instead of, in effect, suggesting that we sit on our hands until the Promised Land arrives.

The ISNB for Rothstein's book is 1932066098 and you can learn more about it by clicking here.  Farkas's article, published in the May 2004 issue of Contexts, can be purchased by clicking here.

Robert Holland and Don Soifer, Lexington Institute
April 2004

Rewarding teachers with better pay based on performance rather than seniority is often derided as "utopian." But a teacher pay scheme in Chattanooga, Tennessee - one of six reform programs profiled in this Lexington Institute study - brings quality teachers to underperforming inner city schools by doing just that. Under the leadership of Mayor Bob Corker, a coalition of community groups and businesses banded together to provide bonuses for high performing teachers if they 1) relocate to low-performing schools and 2) are able to significantly improve the academic gains made by students in those schools. The study's authors also summarize other grassroots reforms such as Florida's tax credit scholarship program, which has enhanced school choice and saved the state millions of dollars, and Colorado's school report cards, which offer accessible and comprehensive information for parents concerning school performance. All in all, a nice summary of promising practices worth repeating elsewhere. Click here to view the report.