The Education Gadfly Weekly

Don Soifer, Lexington Institute
January 2002

This slim report summarizes the bilingual education reforms contained in the No Child Left Behind Act and describes what some states are doing in the area of bilingual education. Under the new law, states choose their own approaches to helping limited English proficient students, but are held accountable for results; if students do not improve their English fluency, funds can be taken away, teachers replaced, or curricula overhauled. The law also requires that parents be informed why and for how long their children are being placed in bilingual education programs. They can also demand that their children be removed from such programs. For a copy of the report, fax (703-522-5837) or e-mail ([email protected]) a request to the Lexington Institute.

Jerry Ellig and Kenneth Kelly, Texas Review of Law & Politics
Spring 2002

What would happen if education were deregulated? It is this question that the authors of "Competition and Quality in Deregulated Industries" seek to answer when they ask whether opening up public education (a state monopoly) to competition will increase or decrease quality. To put that question in context, the authors, economists working with the Federal Trade Commission, review what has happened to other "critical public services" that were de-regulated in the past two decades-surface freight transportation, long-distance telecommunications, and airlines. In reviewing the evidence, they show that competition tends to lower prices and improve services for virtually all customers, including those who choose to remain with the former monopoly; competition thus improves both the traditional monopoly service provider as well as the new entrants. The authors reviewed studies of voucher and private scholarship programs to see whether the introduction of competition to public schools has had a similar same effect. In examining the Milwaukee voucher program, they discovered that those public schools that faced competition saw student test scores rise twice as much as those facing no outside competition. In assessing the impact of privately funded voucher programs in Washington, DC, New York City and Dayton, OH, the authors noted dramatic gains in the academic achievement of African-American students. In short, they contend, early indications show that competition in education has the same effect it has had on other critical public services: it spurs improved performance. The paper is available at www.rppi.org/education/education31.pdf.

Committee on Economic Development
2002

This report from the Committee on Economic Development could have been written decades ago by almost any advocacy group. With one exception, it reads like a run of the mill plea for federal and state governments to spend many billions to provide universal access to preschool for every American child from age 3. It focuses on access, money and government. It understates the failings of many existing preschool and day care programs already serving millions of American youngsters: their neglect of (and sometimes hostility toward) an organized, effective, school-readiness curriculum. It overstates the role of the federal government as funder, standard-setter and regulator. Its main virtue-that one exception-is that it wants these expanded pre-kindergarten programs to be delivered by a variety of public and private organizations and wants parents to be able to choose among them. It is, in that sense, a plea for universal pre-school vouchers for American families. It would probably be more compelling if the authors had paid any attention to budgetary realities and perhaps limited themselves to low-income children. It would surely be more compelling if it addressed the central flaw in much of what passes for pre-school today (including the beloved Headstart program): its failure to prepare children (especially poor children) for academic success when they reach school, a failure attributable in large measure to the widely held view among program operators and staff that their job is to nurture their wee charges but not to teach them sounds, shapes, colors, words and letters. How much more might be accomplished if the titans of industry who put their names to this report tackled the problem that needs to be solved before there's much point in seeking out tens of billions of dollars for more of the same. If you desire, nonetheless, to see for yourself, surf to www.ced.org and you will find information about ordering the report plus a PDF version to download.

Public Agenda
2002

How much does (high) school size matter to American students, teachers and parents? With support from the Gates Foundation, Public Agenda set out to investigate. They surveyed teachers and students in both small and large high schools, as well as 800 parents of high school students. Gates's Tom Vander Ark says the findings "demonstrate the value of small schools." And there is no gainsaying that parents of children in small high schools are more pleased with those schools than are parents of kids in big schools. Among the kids, however, the differences are slight. Public Agenda found far more similarities of view than differences as between those enrolled in small and large high schools. The main differences are predictable: more crowded corridors in big schools, more homogeneous students in small ones. That's about it. As for teachers, differences emerge on a few issues (overcrowding, students "falling through the cracks"), but on many dimensions (e.g. school spirit, teacher morale, parent involvement) the differences are minor or nonexistent. The most significant parts of this valuable study, in my view, have very little to do with school size. Rather, they again show the generally dismal state of the American high school, a place of much violence, low morale, and mediocre academic performance. Small schools haven't licked those problems nor insulated their pupils from them. Says Public Agenda: "Many students in small high schools nationwide still inhabit a rough-edged world, replete with the usual panoply of adolescent risks." High school reform is a huge project awaiting American education. But doing what's needed will take considerably more than shrinking the size of those institutions. For your own copy (downloadable for free until March 13, after which you'll have to buy a hard copy by dialing 212-686-6610) go to www.publicagenda.org/specials/smallschools/smallschools.htm.

Recent events make painfully clear that we cannot take the spread of democracy for granted, writes American Federation of Teachers president Sandy Feldman in her monthly "Where We Stand" column. Devotion to human dignity and freedom, to equal rights, and to the rule of law must be taught and learned and practiced. As the Afghani government and international agencies turn to the task of rebuilding that country's education system, she urges the United States to support efforts to bring democratic ideas and subjects like science, math, and economics to that nation's schools, including programs that disseminate worthy books and curricula. See "Teaching Democracy," at http://www.aft.org/stand/index.html. Chester Finn made a similar argument in a recent Gadfly editorial, "What to do about education in the Islamic world?" in the February 20, 2002 issue.

As readers may recall, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation keeps one eye focused on education reform issues at the national level and the other trained on K-12 education developments in Dayton, Ohio, where the Foundation had its origins and is engaged in a number of projects.

Dayton is more interesting than you might think for education reformers. It lacks the visibility of a New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia yet shares many of the same challenges. Three decades of forced busing and middle-class flight have taken their toll. Dayton's population is now 70 percent minority and disproportionately poor. The remaining families have watched their public schools deteriorate such that they met only three of the state's 27 standards in 2001. Fewer than one in four of the city's fourth graders met state reading benchmarks in 2000 and math scores are worse. Meanwhile, the enrollment hemorrhage continues: from 60,000 students in the 1960s to 21,000 today.

Though small, the public school system has been as dysfunctional as any in the land. While the current superintendent means well and has good ideas, she, like her predecessor, was hamstrung by an ineffectual, quarrelsome, and highly political school board, by a change-averse bureaucracy, by an acute lack of strong middle managers, and by a highly restrictive contract with a teachers union that seems allergic to every sort of serious reform.

Because the system's problems seemed so intractable, parents sought options outside the traditional public schools and, in recent years, reformers (including us) have concentrated on creating other opportunities for needy Dayton children, primarily through a privately funded scholarship program that assisted them to attend private schools (and would have assisted them to attend other public schools had not the suburban districts slammed their doors) and a battery of new charter schools. With close to 4,000 students now enrolled in 13 charter schools, Dayton is as active a center of charter activity as can be found in America. This creates options that benefit children in the short run. But would the competition also leverage change in the traditional public school system with all its woes?

Whether this development can be attributed to competition or not, a sunbeam broke through the public school clouds in November when a slate of four reform-minded women won the majority of seats on the school board. Though they've been in office for just two months, they seem bent on doing exactly what they promised during the campaign: bringing long overdue change to the Dayton Public Schools.

But what form should that change take? How to pay for it? What to do first?

This effort just got a major boost from the Council of the Great City Schools, which has submitted a blunt, hundred-page report titled "Raising Student Achievement in the Dayton Public Schools." (A PDF version can be accessed on the web at http://www.cgcs.org/pdfs/Daytonreport02.pdf.)

This review was requested by superintendent Jerrie Bascome McGill and the previous school board but arrived just in time for the new board to build on. Underwritten by the Broad Foundation, it's a tough, candid, constructive appraisal, worthy of note by all public school reformers, thanks to its sensible ideas, its willingness to poke some sacred cows, and its constructive nature. That the teams preparing it consisted of "peers" from other urban school systems may also make its advice easier to swallow. They're not think-tankers or bomb throwers. They're clear-eyed realists who have walked the walk.

Dayton's public schools have myriad problems, and it's easy to be overwhelmed and discouraged if one tries to tackle them all at once. So the Council's teams focused on five that are especially urgent:

• Dreadfully low student achievement-and the system's failure to focus its energies and resources on raising it.
  
• Nebulous education goals, blurred priorities and weak, divided leadership.
  
• No clear lines of accountability or responsibility.
  
• Plenty of data but no real information-based decision-making.
  
• A higher level of per pupil revenue ($10,056 in 1999-2000) than other Ohio cities but a smaller fraction (47.7%) of that money devoted to instruction.

What to do? The Council's proposed cure follows from its diagnosis:

1. Focus the entire district laser-like on student performance, setting citywide reading and math standards, centralizing curricular and professional-development decisions, and hiring a "reading czar." Cease all school-based "comprehensive reform models."
   
2. Give principals greater hiring latitude but place them and central office staffers on "annual performance contracts tied to meeting academic targets."
   
3. Create an open-enrollment plan whereby parents can choose any public school in the city for their children.
   
4. Strengthen communications and community relations.
   
5. Reprogram a big chunk of the budget into instruction by closing unneeded schools, dismissing surplus staff and imposing operational efficiencies. The bolder of the Council's two financial scenarios for Dayton would re-direct $25 million into instruction while targeting $21 million of federal aid on urgent instructional priorities. This would total more than $2000 per student per year if fully implemented, enough to fund nearly all of the Council's other recommendations.

The Council plainly could have gone farther. Its report might be termed "urban school reform 101." It says little about high schools, for example, and doesn't directly address the major rigidities in the union contracts. Its version of school choice doesn't avail itself of the opportunity to "charter" individual schools, giving them genuine autonomy cum accountability. It says little about collateral possibilities such as pre-school and technology.

But it's a fine beginning blueprint for an earnest new school board and a commendable example of American public education trying to fix itself. It suggests that the problems of urban schools are not so complex as to defy all solutions. There are straightforward, no-nonsense, affordable steps begging to be taken. The hard part, of course, will be finding the resolve-and political ingenuity-to break out of ingrained habits and dysfunctional patterns.

Will this happen in Dayton? So far, the school board is picking from the Council's recommendations, not embracing the whole report. And the president of the local teachers union has already voiced opposition to much of it, especially such needed steps as reconstituting failing schools by reassigning staff members and tying teacher evaluations to student performance.

The new school board and other community leaders plainly have their work cut out. Dayton's education challenges remain enormous. But there are many places like it in America, which is why what happens in that small city should interest education reformers far beyond southwestern Ohio. Our children's future doesn't depend only on developments in big, famous places. It hinges equally on the prospects for education improvement in communities like Dayton. Watch this space.

The new federal education law, the No Child Left Behind Act, demands in many places that programs funded by federal dollars be supported by "scientifically based research," but among practitioners, and even some researchers, there is great uncertainty about what this means. To clarify what scientifically based research is and to explain why it is so crucial, the U.S. Department of Education hosted a seminar on the topic in February 2002. The transcript of that seminar, as well as papers by the presenters, are now available on the department's web site. In the opening presentation, Valerie Reyna of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement describes the alternatives to scientific research and lays out the logic behind randomized field trials-which she describes as the best kind of evidence-and other kinds of research (including quasi-experimental or correlational studies) in plain language. In another presentation, Steve Raudenbush of the University of Michigan describes how the medical profession was gradually converted to the view of basing its practice on scientific research, explores when random assignment studies are desirable and when they are not, and explains how we can judge the scientific quality of studies that do not use random assignment, with the key factor being whether investigators have effectively evaluated competing explanations for what is found. A transcript of and papers from the seminar on scientifically based research hosted by the U.S. Department of Education can be found at http://www/ed.gov/nclb/research.

An article in last week's Economist describes an international effort to summarize the evidence for the effectiveness of various social interventions, including education initiatives. The Campbell Collaboration, which held its second annual conference in Philadelphia last month, brings together social scientists, statisticians, and policymakers to identify all relevant experimental studies on a topic, such as the effectiveness of whole-language reading instruction, and review them systematically, choosing the best studies using clearly defined criteria and combining the results in a statistically valid way. So far, the group has identified 11,000 experimental studies (i.e. studies that involve random assignment) in all of the social sciences, and reviews have been completed on a range of topics. For more see "Try it and see," in the February 28 issue of the Economist. More information about the Campbell Collaboration can be found at http://campbell.gse.upenn.edu.

While opponents of standardized testing continue to attract attention in the media, a national survey released by Public Agenda this week found that support for turning back the clock on the standards movement is virtually nonexistent among parents (2 percent), teachers (1 percent), employers (2 percent), and college professors (1 percent), with very large majorities among each group also viewing standardized tests as a motivational tool that prompts students to work harder. 95 percent of students in the survey said that they either can deal with the stress of standardized tests or don't worry at all about taking them. Most students and teachers said that preparing for the tests has not detracted from learning in their classrooms. While employers and college professors are giving public schools more credit for raising academic standards, they continue to complain that students emerging from those schools have weak writing, grammar, and basic math skills. Roughly 75 percent of employers and college professors say that the high school graduates they encounter have just fair or poor skills in grammar, spelling, and the ability to write clearly, and two thirds of both groups say the same about high school graduates' skills in basic math.

In Massachusetts, despite reports of anti-testing "backlash," support for standards-based reform appears to be growing. Bay State education officials announced last week that almost half of the 12,000 high school juniors who failed the state's challenging exit exam in English in 2001 passed it on their second attempt and that about one-third of the 15,000 students who failed the math test in 2001 cleared the hurdle this time around. "The vision of large numbers of seniors locked out of graduation exercises is starting to fade," wrote the editors of The Boston Globe in an editorial. "Employers, colleges, and military recruiters can be confident that the diplomas presented to this class will be weightier than those of its predecessors."

In New York, a small group of critics continues to express displeasure with the state's standardized tests. According to an article in Wednesday's New York Times, students at two alternative schools are boycotting this year's test and two legislators are trying to force the Board of Regents to accept alternatives to standardized tests, such as portfolios of student work. The parents complain that the tests distract schools from a curriculum that would surpass that covered by the state tests, but state officials say that children should be able to pass the tests without any special preparation.

"Reality Check 2002: The Impact of School Standards," and "Public Agenda: Reality Check 2002," Education Week, March 6, 2002

"Class Act on the MCAS," The Boston Globe, March 1, 2002, (available for a fee at http://www.bostonglobe.com)

"Boycotts and a Bill Protest Mandatory State Tests," by Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times, March 6, 2002

Committee on Economic Development
2002

This report from the Committee on Economic Development could have been written decades ago by almost any advocacy group. With one exception, it reads like a run of the mill plea for federal and state governments to spend many billions to provide universal access to preschool for every American child from age 3. It focuses on access, money and government. It understates the failings of many existing preschool and day care programs already serving millions of American youngsters: their neglect of (and sometimes hostility toward) an organized, effective, school-readiness curriculum. It overstates the role of the federal government as funder, standard-setter and regulator. Its main virtue-that one exception-is that it wants these expanded pre-kindergarten programs to be delivered by a variety of public and private organizations and wants parents to be able to choose among them. It is, in that sense, a plea for universal pre-school vouchers for American families. It would probably be more compelling if the authors had paid any attention to budgetary realities and perhaps limited themselves to low-income children. It would surely be more compelling if it addressed the central flaw in much of what passes for pre-school today (including the beloved Headstart program): its failure to prepare children (especially poor children) for academic success when they reach school, a failure attributable in large measure to the widely held view among program operators and staff that their job is to nurture their wee charges but not to teach them sounds, shapes, colors, words and letters. How much more might be accomplished if the titans of industry who put their names to this report tackled the problem that needs to be solved before there's much point in seeking out tens of billions of dollars for more of the same. If you desire, nonetheless, to see for yourself, surf to www.ced.org and you will find information about ordering the report plus a PDF version to download.

Don Soifer, Lexington Institute
January 2002

This slim report summarizes the bilingual education reforms contained in the No Child Left Behind Act and describes what some states are doing in the area of bilingual education. Under the new law, states choose their own approaches to helping limited English proficient students, but are held accountable for results; if students do not improve their English fluency, funds can be taken away, teachers replaced, or curricula overhauled. The law also requires that parents be informed why and for how long their children are being placed in bilingual education programs. They can also demand that their children be removed from such programs. For a copy of the report, fax (703-522-5837) or e-mail ([email protected]) a request to the Lexington Institute.

Jerry Ellig and Kenneth Kelly, Texas Review of Law & Politics
Spring 2002

What would happen if education were deregulated? It is this question that the authors of "Competition and Quality in Deregulated Industries" seek to answer when they ask whether opening up public education (a state monopoly) to competition will increase or decrease quality. To put that question in context, the authors, economists working with the Federal Trade Commission, review what has happened to other "critical public services" that were de-regulated in the past two decades-surface freight transportation, long-distance telecommunications, and airlines. In reviewing the evidence, they show that competition tends to lower prices and improve services for virtually all customers, including those who choose to remain with the former monopoly; competition thus improves both the traditional monopoly service provider as well as the new entrants. The authors reviewed studies of voucher and private scholarship programs to see whether the introduction of competition to public schools has had a similar same effect. In examining the Milwaukee voucher program, they discovered that those public schools that faced competition saw student test scores rise twice as much as those facing no outside competition. In assessing the impact of privately funded voucher programs in Washington, DC, New York City and Dayton, OH, the authors noted dramatic gains in the academic achievement of African-American students. In short, they contend, early indications show that competition in education has the same effect it has had on other critical public services: it spurs improved performance. The paper is available at www.rppi.org/education/education31.pdf.

Public Agenda
2002

How much does (high) school size matter to American students, teachers and parents? With support from the Gates Foundation, Public Agenda set out to investigate. They surveyed teachers and students in both small and large high schools, as well as 800 parents of high school students. Gates's Tom Vander Ark says the findings "demonstrate the value of small schools." And there is no gainsaying that parents of children in small high schools are more pleased with those schools than are parents of kids in big schools. Among the kids, however, the differences are slight. Public Agenda found far more similarities of view than differences as between those enrolled in small and large high schools. The main differences are predictable: more crowded corridors in big schools, more homogeneous students in small ones. That's about it. As for teachers, differences emerge on a few issues (overcrowding, students "falling through the cracks"), but on many dimensions (e.g. school spirit, teacher morale, parent involvement) the differences are minor or nonexistent. The most significant parts of this valuable study, in my view, have very little to do with school size. Rather, they again show the generally dismal state of the American high school, a place of much violence, low morale, and mediocre academic performance. Small schools haven't licked those problems nor insulated their pupils from them. Says Public Agenda: "Many students in small high schools nationwide still inhabit a rough-edged world, replete with the usual panoply of adolescent risks." High school reform is a huge project awaiting American education. But doing what's needed will take considerably more than shrinking the size of those institutions. For your own copy (downloadable for free until March 13, after which you'll have to buy a hard copy by dialing 212-686-6610) go to www.publicagenda.org/specials/smallschools/smallschools.htm.