The Education Gadfly Weekly

Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and U.S. Department of Education
November 2002

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy is a worthy group of prominent social scientists and other thinkers (including our own Diane Ravitch) that undertook this report in collaboration with the federal Education Department. It argues that future education interventions should be based on high-quality scientific research, which it equates with randomized field trials. This would not even be newsworthy in many fields, but in education it amounts to a revolution. The report urges the Department (which is a bit like the Department urging itself) to devote its discretionary dollars to such research, not only within explicit research programs but also in "discretionary" programs and those where money is set aside for "national" activities. It cites several examples (reading, pre-school, substance abuse) where randomized trials have produced significant findings about particular interventions. (It does not, however, mention the voucher programs that have been subject to similar research.) Perhaps just as important for the education research world, the report is highly critical of the "pre-post" and "comparison group" (or "quasi-experimental") studies that are widespread but often yield biased results. You can download a copy of this provocative document at http://www.excelgov.org/usermedia/images/uploads/PDFs/coalitionFinRpt.pdf.

Conor Ryan, Centre for Policy Studies
2002

Written by Conor Ryan, a freelance writer who previously served as special adviser to David Blunkett, England's minister of education in the Blair government, this 32-page mini-book argues that all the education reforms of the past 15 years, consequential as they've been, leave some very important steps untaken. In particular, "A quarter of 11 year olds still cannot read properly. It takes two and a half years to sack a bad teacher. And there are too many bad schools." To solve these problems, he recommends "radical solutions." These include wider use of "synthetic phonics"; big changes in teacher training; an overhaul of vocational training; more use of "value-added" data to spot schools that are "coasting"; the expansion of good schools and the faster closing of bad ones; and more outsourcing of troubled schools to private operators (with freedom to replace staff). Much of this is familiar stuff but it's interesting to see these issues examined through British lenses. You can download a copy (in PDF format) at http://www.cps.org.uk/conor.pdf.

U.S. Department of Education
November 2002

As everyone surely knows, the federal Education Department recently issued final regulations for the Title I program under No Child Left Behind. It's a 185-page document joined by a 190-page appendix, in which the Department explains the changes that it did or didn't make in the draft regulations published last summer. Everyone also knows that some state officials are voicing dismay at the supposed inflexibility of these regulations, and that - in a wonderfully ironic twist - some prominent Democrats are lamenting the damage that the Republican administration is doing to states' rights and local control, particularly with respect to "adequate yearly progress" and the (limited) choice provisions of NCLB. (Others complain that the regulations don't crack down hard enough on the states.) For the most part, it looks to me, the regulation-writers were faithful to the letter and spirit of the No Child Left Behind act, insisting that its provisions will be complied with even in spheres (such as public school alternatives for children stuck in failing schools) where states and communities have ignored the law or asserted that compliance is unrealistic To understand the agency's reasoning, examine the appendix. While some issues addressed there are highly technical or limited in impact (e.g. is it meaningful to talk about "adequate yearly progress" for youngsters enrolled "in a juvenile justice alternative education program for less than a full academic year"?), others deal with major disputes. On the matter of public school choice, for example, "Several commentators maintained that existing overcrowding of schools, teacher shortages, transportation difficulties, class-size limits...and other capacity issues prevent many LEAs from implementing the public school choice option." To which the Department said, "ESEA does not permit an LEA to preclude choice options on the basis of capacity constraints. Rather, the statute requires an LEA to take measures to overcome issues such as overcrowding, class size limits....This could mean, for example, adding classes and hiring additional teachers...." Overall, an appendix reader is apt to be struck by the fact that, for every objection to rigidities in the draft regs, there was at least one beef about flexibility. The regulation writers seem to have handled most of these in conscientious fashion, though politics sometimes rears its head. (They evidently yielded, for example, to the teacher unions' alarm that school reconstitution efforts would supersede future collective bargaining agreements). Because such regulations are not self-implementing, we obviously won't know for a while just how successfully NCLB will be put into practice by the nation's states, districts and schools, but it seems fair to conclude that, insofar as it doesn't work as intended, most of that failure must be addressed in the statute itself, not the Department's regulations. If you have the patience to download this behemoth, you can find it at http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/finrule/2002-4/120202a.pdf.

Bruce J. Biddle and David C. Berliner, WestEd
Winter 2002

The tag-team of Bruce J. Biddle and David C. Berliner is at it again, trying to settle the class-size dispute in favor of those who want to shrink the number of kids in a given classroom. It's published as a "policy perspective" by WestEd, the regional lab, but the fine print notes that Messrs. Biddle and Berliner supervise that whole series of reports. Although this one purports to be a meta-analysis, in fact, as the authors note, there's been only one true class-size reduction experiment of any scale or duration, the much-discussed Tennessee STAR venture. Everything else is either a "pilot" program or, as in California's massive class-size reduction effort, a universal policy. To their credit, they acknowledge that California's venture has worked badly, but they ascribe its problems to poor implementation and meager funding, not erroneous theory. They're obviously sold on the theory. They offer no alternative theories, such as the hypothesis (by Lakdawala and others) that America's fixation on smaller classes has more to do with compensating for WEAK teachers - and with the many powerful interests arrayed on behalf of MORE teachers. Nor do they mention the planet's many nations that have (by U.S. standards) huge classes but continue to best us in every international assessment. You can see for yourself at http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/small_classes.pdf.

In last month's Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt argued that politicians' grandiose promises to turn around failing schools - which reveal a lopsided emphasis on the condition of education at the expense of other pressing issues - are harmful and misleading. In addition to inflating hopes, the school reform crusade perpetuates the dangerous notion that cities can't be healthy until their schools are "fixed," he wrote. Judging by the revival of such metropolises as Boston and Chicago (but not those cities' schools), Ehrenhalt contends that better schools are one of the last stages of urban renewal, following safe streets, bustling commerce and efficient transportation. "The School-Renewal Fallacy," by Alan Ehrenhalt, Governing, November 2002

In a ringing endorsement of charter schools, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter recently explained why "mindless boards of education and reactionary teachers unions" are trying to smear them. He claims charters are a "workable and often inspiring form of public school choice" halfway between vouchers and the status quo - and, as such, they threaten the establishment's power. "Attack of the Blob," by Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, November 27, 2002

The Peach State's public university system will retrain graduates of its fifteen teacher ed programs if they prove ineffective within their first two years on the job. The extra training - possibly the country's first large-scale attempt to guarantee teacher quality - will be provided at no cost to the teacher or school district. "Georgia teachers now guaranteed," by Rebecca McCarthy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 4, 2002

The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently unveiled a new website where one can obtain comparative data on U.S. nursing homes - thousands and thousands of them. Check out http://www.medicare.gov/NHCompare/Home.asp and follow the steps to locate a county, city or state that interests you. It's fascinating. You can get factual information about individual nursing homes. You can also get quality measures (e.g. percentage of patients with "pressure sores") and can compare these with state and national averages. You can learn how many "deficiencies" a nursing home had during its most recent inspection, how serious these were and when (and if) they were corrected. You can determine the average "nursing staff hours per resident per day," and lots more. You can comparison shop - at least begin to narrow the field - in the locale of your choosing. For example: Montgomery County, Ohio has 38 nursing homes in this system. (So, it turns out, does Montgomery County, Maryland.)

If I were hunting for a nursing home for a loved one, this would be an immensely valuable and efficient way to get started. In the end, of course, it won't provide sufficient basis for a complicated decision. Picking a nursing home isn't like ordering a book or shirt via the internet. But how terrific to be able to start by specifying a geographic area and then doing basic investigations of the options without leaving one's desk. Instead of 38 nursing homes to visit, phone or get literature from (some of it advertising hype seeking to persuade rather than inform), I could, via this system, narrow my search to a few alternatives and then get serious about checking them out in all the subjective and objective ways that one wants to when making a difficult selection for someone I care about.

When we turn to K-12 schooling, however, that information paradise is still a considerable distance off. Uncle Sam provides no school-specific information and, it seems safe to wager, many people wouldn't want it to. In the No Child Left Behind act, however, states receiving Title I funding (which is all of them) are obliged to prepare and disseminate annual "report cards" at the school, district and statewide levels. This requirement kicked in with the current school year. At the building level, the district is supposed, at minimum, to provide "information that shows the school's students' achievement on the statewide academic assessments and other indicators of...progress compared to students in the local educational agency and the State as a whole." It may also include other information. Whatever data it furnishes, the district is supposed to disseminate these report cards "to all schools in the school district...and to all parents of students attending those schools in an understandable and uniform format."

Many states and districts were already doing this and more. "School report cards" are not a new idea. But how user-friendly are they? How readily comparable from school to school, to district and to state? To what extent do they truly advance the two large purposes for which they're intended, namely accountability and informed family choices?

It's a mixed picture and, for the most part, not a happy one for parents unless they're sophisticated Internet users and veteran number crunchers. Many of the hard-copy school report cards contain information only about that particular school. They don't supply the basis for informed comparisons with key benchmarks, standards and averages, much less for thoughtful choices among schools.

Parents and educators who can get on the internet and parse data will fare better. Check out your district's or state's offerings and see what you find. Ohio, for example, provides both pre-packaged school-specific report cards (see http://www.ode.state.oh.us/reportcardfiles/2002/BUILD/018119.PDF for a specimen, which happens to be the elementary school I attended in medieval times). It recently added an interactive version by which users can specify the data they want and create their own report cards. (See http://ilrc.ode.state.oh.us/default_real.asp.) Some districts also do their own, and some of these are conscientious and thorough.

System-supplied data typically suffer from two shortcomings, however. One is lack of user-friendliness, transparency, etc. The other is a self-serving tendency to provide the information that the system wants people to have, which isn't necessarily the information they most need when judging school performance or making choices.

But relief is coming. In the past few years, several outfits have emerged as intermediaries, data analysts, packagers and vendors of school information. And they're getting better at it.

The best known of them is "Just for the Kids" (JFTK), which began in Texas and, in partnership with the Education Commission of the States, is rapidly moving into other states. (See http://www.just4kids.org/us/us_home.asp.) Its great strength is taking state test results and interpreting them in ways that are helpful to educators and policy makers. If I were a principal, department head or superintendent, this is where I'd go to see how my students were doing compared with other relevant groups and schools in my state. It's less helpful for parents, though. It doesn't tell you much about the school as such but, rather, about its scores in various grades and subjects and some revealing comparisons with other schools and averages.

The parent-friendly niche is nicely filled by a group called GreatSchools, which does Internet-based school report cards that ordinary laymen can comprehend. They began in California, added Arizona, and are spreading across the landscape as fast as they can. Check out http://www.greatschools.net/. They give you a manageable amount of information about the school itself, as well as its academic results, though the latter are not presented with the sophistication of JFTK. Compare, for example, GreatSchools' handling of (the randomly selected) Ramirez Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas (http://www.greatschools.net/modperl/browse_school/tx/4505) with JFTK'S information for the same school: http://www.just4kids.org/TX/TX_elem_school.asp?campus_name=Ramirez%20El,%20Lubbock%20ISD&campus_id=152901146.

With JFTK and Great Schools focusing on education issues, the School Evaluation Service of Standard & Poors has moved into the "cost-benefit" and "efficiency" territory. As previously noted in the Gadfly (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=41#606), S & P is doing an ever-better job of assisting Michigan and Pennsylvania policymakers (and sophisticated school leaders and parents) make sense of district-by-district and (in Michigan) school-by-school performance along various gauges, with a particular eye toward the relationship between inputs and results. You can find them on the web at http://ses.standardandpoors.com/. They, too, are seeking to work in more states, and several funders are conspiring to make this happen. A couple of states now want to marry the S & P analysis of school performance with the Just for the Kids analysis of academic achievement. That could be powerful, though again probably a challenge for ordinary parents to navigate.

Then there are providers of systems that enable schools and parents to track THEIR kids' performance every week and relate it to the school's curriculum and the state's academic standards. When aggregated, such data can also help policymakers, but their real strength is in assisting teachers to do a better job and parents to monitor their child's academic progress. My favorite among these offerings is Project Achieve (on whose board I once served), created by the founder of a crackerjack Boston charter school who realized that schools are awash in fugitive information about academic progress yet principals (and teachers) can rarely capture and use it. Have a look at www.projectachieve.com.

The bad news: it's all still confusing and messy, it's patchy (too many states and districts still get by with opaque, self-serving report cards) and, except in a few places, it's still hard for parents to navigate. Today most people will find it far easier to locate a nursing home for an aging relative than to track down the right school for their daughter or son. But the potential is immense, the need is great and, let us hope, the combination of NCLB, capitalist enterprise, philanthropic vision, state envy, and consumer demand will move this along at a rapid pace in the next few years.

After months of heated debate, the Massachusetts Board of Education has voted to allow Bay State school districts to award "certificates of attainment" to students who, despite solid attendance and acceptable grades in their academic courses, thrice fail to pass the MCAS exam required for high school graduation. Districts are not required to issue such certificates, and it is uncertain whether employers, the military and the federal government will view the new credential as equivalent to a full diploma. "Fail safe?: Sparks fly over plan for non-MCAS 'diplomas'," by Ed Hayward, Boston Herald, November 27, 2002

The National Education Association has released an 8-page update to its annual Rankings & Estimates: Ranking of the States and Estimates of School Statistics, which will now be compiled semi-annually. (For a review of the most recent edition, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=61#881.) The update - a thinly veiled attempt to re-inject the issue of "low" teacher pay into the news - notes that teacher salaries grew more slowly than the economy in 2001-02. "Rankings & Estimates: A Report of School Statistics: Update," National Education Association, Fall 2002

The Progressive Policy Institute recently released a pair of brief policy reports that deserve your attention. Noting that the establishment has long protected the status quo by labeling change-agents "anti-public education," Frederick Hess advances a framework for thinking and talking about ways whereby schooling can preserve our "shared heritage of liberty and community" while focusing on what's best for kids, not the public education system. Jonathan Crane offers a plug for value-added testing, explaining why it's likely to make NCLB more effective, boost teacher quality, and help determine which school reform models actually work. Hess's "Making Sense of the 'Public' in Public Education," is available at www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=110&subsecid=134&contentid=251034; Crane's "The Promise of Value-Added Testing" can be found at http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=110&subsecid=136&contentid=251035.

In its issue of November 27, 2002, Education Week described the efforts being made by public schools to accommodate the religious needs of Islamic pupils. This includes, in some schools, setting aside a room where students can pray together during school hours and making special arrangements for students who are fasting during Ramadan.

Public schools across the nation, to the extent that their enrollment includes Muslim students, are facing similar issues. In New York City, for example, a number of schools have designated a room in which Muslim students can worship.

As one reads about these accommodations, one is reminded of the Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn't bark. In this instance, the dog is the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU has traditionally been vigilant in taking legal action against any acknowledgement of religion in the public square and, specifically, in the public schools. Civil liberties lawyers have sued to remove all religious activities and symbols from schools and to ensure that they remain resolutely secular.

Thus it is indeed surprising that the ACLU has not voiced a peep about public schools that set aside special prayer rooms for Muslim students. Would they be equally silent if public schools set aside special rooms where Catholic students could say the Rosary, where Protestant students could pray together, or where Jewish students could study the Torah? One hopes that the ACLU will one day soon take a position on the most recent efforts to accommodate religious belief in the public schools.

Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

"Schools Adapting to Muslim Holy Month," by Nashiah Ahmad, Education Week, November 27, 2002

In the December issue of American School Board Journal, Harry Wong and Christina Asquith make the case for a comprehensive, multi-year "induction" program for fledgling educators that goes beyond assigning a mentor and passing out copies of the discipline code ("Supporting New Teachers"; not available online). In the same issue, a five-article special report on "Leading City Schools" looks at whether mayoral efforts are improving urban schools; why the pool of "qualified" superintendents is depleting [hint: it excludes many successful professionals with non-education backgrounds]; why school boards must take charge of reform; where city schools are succeeding; and how private support for public schools is growing. You'll find the special report at http://www.asbj.com/specialreports/1202.html.

Bruce J. Biddle and David C. Berliner, WestEd
Winter 2002

The tag-team of Bruce J. Biddle and David C. Berliner is at it again, trying to settle the class-size dispute in favor of those who want to shrink the number of kids in a given classroom. It's published as a "policy perspective" by WestEd, the regional lab, but the fine print notes that Messrs. Biddle and Berliner supervise that whole series of reports. Although this one purports to be a meta-analysis, in fact, as the authors note, there's been only one true class-size reduction experiment of any scale or duration, the much-discussed Tennessee STAR venture. Everything else is either a "pilot" program or, as in California's massive class-size reduction effort, a universal policy. To their credit, they acknowledge that California's venture has worked badly, but they ascribe its problems to poor implementation and meager funding, not erroneous theory. They're obviously sold on the theory. They offer no alternative theories, such as the hypothesis (by Lakdawala and others) that America's fixation on smaller classes has more to do with compensating for WEAK teachers - and with the many powerful interests arrayed on behalf of MORE teachers. Nor do they mention the planet's many nations that have (by U.S. standards) huge classes but continue to best us in every international assessment. You can see for yourself at http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/small_classes.pdf.

Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and U.S. Department of Education
November 2002

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy is a worthy group of prominent social scientists and other thinkers (including our own Diane Ravitch) that undertook this report in collaboration with the federal Education Department. It argues that future education interventions should be based on high-quality scientific research, which it equates with randomized field trials. This would not even be newsworthy in many fields, but in education it amounts to a revolution. The report urges the Department (which is a bit like the Department urging itself) to devote its discretionary dollars to such research, not only within explicit research programs but also in "discretionary" programs and those where money is set aside for "national" activities. It cites several examples (reading, pre-school, substance abuse) where randomized trials have produced significant findings about particular interventions. (It does not, however, mention the voucher programs that have been subject to similar research.) Perhaps just as important for the education research world, the report is highly critical of the "pre-post" and "comparison group" (or "quasi-experimental") studies that are widespread but often yield biased results. You can download a copy of this provocative document at http://www.excelgov.org/usermedia/images/uploads/PDFs/coalitionFinRpt.pdf.

Conor Ryan, Centre for Policy Studies
2002

Written by Conor Ryan, a freelance writer who previously served as special adviser to David Blunkett, England's minister of education in the Blair government, this 32-page mini-book argues that all the education reforms of the past 15 years, consequential as they've been, leave some very important steps untaken. In particular, "A quarter of 11 year olds still cannot read properly. It takes two and a half years to sack a bad teacher. And there are too many bad schools." To solve these problems, he recommends "radical solutions." These include wider use of "synthetic phonics"; big changes in teacher training; an overhaul of vocational training; more use of "value-added" data to spot schools that are "coasting"; the expansion of good schools and the faster closing of bad ones; and more outsourcing of troubled schools to private operators (with freedom to replace staff). Much of this is familiar stuff but it's interesting to see these issues examined through British lenses. You can download a copy (in PDF format) at http://www.cps.org.uk/conor.pdf.

U.S. Department of Education
November 2002

As everyone surely knows, the federal Education Department recently issued final regulations for the Title I program under No Child Left Behind. It's a 185-page document joined by a 190-page appendix, in which the Department explains the changes that it did or didn't make in the draft regulations published last summer. Everyone also knows that some state officials are voicing dismay at the supposed inflexibility of these regulations, and that - in a wonderfully ironic twist - some prominent Democrats are lamenting the damage that the Republican administration is doing to states' rights and local control, particularly with respect to "adequate yearly progress" and the (limited) choice provisions of NCLB. (Others complain that the regulations don't crack down hard enough on the states.) For the most part, it looks to me, the regulation-writers were faithful to the letter and spirit of the No Child Left Behind act, insisting that its provisions will be complied with even in spheres (such as public school alternatives for children stuck in failing schools) where states and communities have ignored the law or asserted that compliance is unrealistic To understand the agency's reasoning, examine the appendix. While some issues addressed there are highly technical or limited in impact (e.g. is it meaningful to talk about "adequate yearly progress" for youngsters enrolled "in a juvenile justice alternative education program for less than a full academic year"?), others deal with major disputes. On the matter of public school choice, for example, "Several commentators maintained that existing overcrowding of schools, teacher shortages, transportation difficulties, class-size limits...and other capacity issues prevent many LEAs from implementing the public school choice option." To which the Department said, "ESEA does not permit an LEA to preclude choice options on the basis of capacity constraints. Rather, the statute requires an LEA to take measures to overcome issues such as overcrowding, class size limits....This could mean, for example, adding classes and hiring additional teachers...." Overall, an appendix reader is apt to be struck by the fact that, for every objection to rigidities in the draft regs, there was at least one beef about flexibility. The regulation writers seem to have handled most of these in conscientious fashion, though politics sometimes rears its head. (They evidently yielded, for example, to the teacher unions' alarm that school reconstitution efforts would supersede future collective bargaining agreements). Because such regulations are not self-implementing, we obviously won't know for a while just how successfully NCLB will be put into practice by the nation's states, districts and schools, but it seems fair to conclude that, insofar as it doesn't work as intended, most of that failure must be addressed in the statute itself, not the Department's regulations. If you have the patience to download this behemoth, you can find it at http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/finrule/2002-4/120202a.pdf.