The Education Gadfly Weekly

Eileen Gale Kugler
2002

This book represents the plea of a mother and advocate (who also happens to be a communications specialist) to other parents, urging them to seek out "diverse schools" for their children. Kugler recommends this course of action based largely on her own experience raising two children who attended a large "diverse" high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. According to Kugler, "The academic and personal growth of my children was staggering in this school with students hailing from more than 85 countries, speaking more than 40 native languages." Kugler believes that similar experiences should become the norm for all kids. For children in wealthy suburbs (according to the 2000 Census, Fairfax's median household income is $91,000, the highest in America) of major metropolitan areas, that option may be real and appealing. I say this as a resident of Fairfax County and someone who values the diversity to be found in my neighborhood, the local schools, restaurants, business and cultural scene. Having grown up in a small Midwestern city, however, I know that such diversity is not the norm in much of America. That reality seems not to matter to Kugler, for whom attending a diverse school matters more than attending an effective school. The biggest problem with this book is what happens if you try and take Kugler's logic and apply it to policy. Should communities seek formulas for making schools "diverse," and then bus children across town to make certain the proper "balance" exists in every school? This has been tried in the recent past and caused far more problems than it solved. A better option is to improve all schools while providing all parents - rich and poor - with real choices as to which schools their children can attend. If you want to know more about this misguided book, go to: http://www.scarecroweducation.com.

Linda Darling-Hammond and Peter Youngs
Education Researcher, December 2002

Secretary Paige certainly caused the hive to buzz when he issued his estimable July 2002 report on teacher quality. (You can read it at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf See also http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=54#802 for the Gadfly's comments on that report.) Its critique of traditional teacher preparation and certification struck hard at the conventional wisdom about boosting teacher quality - a project that has become more urgent in view of NCLB's requirement that every U.S. school child be taught by "highly qualified" teachers not later than 2006. The latest rejoinder was issued in the December issue of the American Education Research Association's Education Researcher by Stanford education professor (and unquenchable protector of the conventional wisdom) Linda Darling-Hammond, joined by Stanford post-doc Peter Youngs. They contend that Paige's conclusions rest on four erroneous arguments, which they seek to debunk in this essay. I don't find theirs a very convincing case - they rehash familiar evidence, much of it old, much of it ambiguous - although the AERA readership will likely lap it up. If you want to see for yourself, you can find it at http://www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol31_09/AERA310903.pdf.

Jack Jennings, Center on Education Policy
January 2003

Jack Jennings's Center on Education Policy is the source of this report, on the second year of NCLB, a useful service (underwritten by a quartet of foundations) that last month yielded this 240-page document. It does a respectable job of setting forth many relevant facts (as seen from the state education agency perspective) with the predictable amount of editorializing and rationalizing. Because most states responded to the project's survey, the report offers data not previously available. It has four main sections: general "perceptions" of NCLB; testing and accountability; public school choice and supplemental services; and teacher quality. A fifth chapter addresses lesser provisions (scientifically based research, Reading First, English language learners.) The headline version of all this is that states and districts are trying hard and want NCLB to succeed, but that it's painful and costly to implement correctly, mainly because of the huge number of schools being identified as "in need of improvement" (or "corrective action"). A particular grievance: the obligation to assess LEP and disabled youngsters on the same tests and hold them to the same standards is widely viewed as unrealistic. If this isn't dealt with in Washington, says Jennings, "There is a risk of losing the commitment of states and school districts to achieving the Act's goals." One bone to pick: in discussing why NCLB's public-school choice provisions are "rarely used," he fails to note the foot-dragging, resistance, and bureaucratic processes that are a major reason why few families are not yet exercising choice. Maybe that's because of where he got his information. In fact, this report might fairly be termed "NCLB as viewed by state education departments," because that's the perspective it takes and those are the agencies whose views the report's authors seem entirely uncritical of. Still, you'll find much timely information here. See for yourself at http://www.ctredpol.org/pubs/nclb_full_report_jan2003/nclb_full_report_jan2003.htm.

Gary Miron, Christopher Nelson, and John Risley
The Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University
October 2002

This report appraises charter schools in Pennsylvania five years along, seeking to gauge their impact and provide some recommendations for the future. It provides a wealth of information for people specifically interested in the Keystone State's 90 charter schools. Its value to everyone else is more limited. Regarding the educational performance of the schools, the authors note that, overall, charter pupils are "gaining ground" on traditional public school students (using PSSA scores, filtered for student background factors), though they voice concern that some schools showed great gains while others great losses. They argue that the Commonwealth's accountability arrangements for its charter schools are not yet adequate: to date, just a quarter of them have even been audited. The report also raises some interesting questions that it does not answer. For example, while teacher and parent satisfaction levels in charters are high, are they higher than in conventional public schools? In private schools? Though they find that some charter-style innovations are beginning to appear in public schools, are those public schools improving? Given the great variation in charter school performance, what characteristics do the best ones share? And what, if anything, can be done to develop charter schools in the 73% of Pennsylvania counties that still have none? To access this study, go to http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr.

Frustration with the books used in public schools to teach children how to read is nothing new. An article in The New Yorker recounts how an attack on primers in the 1955 best-seller Why Johnny Can't Read ultimately led to publication of The Cat in the Hat and other classics by Dr. Seuss. Not only were primers "horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers," charged Rudolf Flesch, the author of the 1955 attack, they were based on a flawed pedagogy: the idea that children learn words by memorizing them rather than sounding them out. After reading Flesch's book, an editor at Houghton Mifflin contacted Dr. Seuss and challenged him to write a story using only words that first-graders could recognize or sound out. The result was The Cat in the Hat, which eventually sold over 7.2 million copies and transformed the nature of children's books because it stood for the idea that reading ought to be taught by phonics, and language skills ought to be taught using illustrated storybooks rather than primers. "Cat People: What Dr. Seuss really taught us," by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2002

As 2003 opens, hollow public treasuries will make it tougher than ever to revitalize American K-12 education - not because more money will improve our schools but because the most painful parts of the reform process lie ahead and, without dollars to cushion the discomfort, politicians will be loath to ask people to endure it.

The education renewal efforts of the past decade were easy compared with the miseries of the next few years. We've passed the laws, designed the necessary changes and put measuring sticks in place, but by and large we haven't yet caused many people or institutions to alter their ways.

That's why, as we approach the twentieth anniversary of "A Nation at Risk", America's overall education performance remains woeful. Test scores are mostly flat. Graduation rates are actually sagging. Racial gaps are still wide. "Failing school" lists contain thousands of entries. Dozens of countries outstrip us on international gauges of student achievement, and some now also boast higher college-going rates.

We surely haven't been idle or chintzy. We've spent billions on reforms of every sort. We've shrunk classes, hired more teachers, installed computers, built new schools, stiffened graduation requirements, added kindergartens, replaced textbooks, devised tests, written manifestos, conducted studies, held summits, set standards, created charter schools, experimented with vouchers, out-sourced school management, "in-serviced" teachers, hired nontraditional superintendents, and on and on. Dozens of governors have pledged to turn around their states' education systems. George W. Bush persuaded Congress to enact the boldest federal education law in history. Business leaders beyond counting have signed up for commissions, task forces and roundtables, all pledged to fix the schools.

Some progress can be glimpsed. A few states, such as Texas and North Carolina, can display slowly rising scores, as can a handful of local school systems (e.g. Charlotte, Houston, Chicago.) There are promising signs in Massachusetts. Where gains are being made, the formula seems to include strong, sustained political leadership over many years with a regime of tests that carry palpable consequences for children and schools alike. But even these "poster states" and districts have yet to turn any big corners. Most of their gains amount to modest upticks in basic skills among low-income youngsters - much needed, yes, but far from an education renaissance. Nobody would claim that all - even most - of the kids in those jurisdictions are learning what they should. And the policy changes that they've made require constant vigilance against relentless attacks from testing opponents, educators who feel that results-based accountability cramps their style, middle class parents convinced that their kids are getting short-changed, civil rights groups alleging that "high stakes" tests discourage minority youngsters, and state and local officials asserting that Uncle Sam must pay for any changes he seeks.

Reforming education is like stretching a Godzilla-size rubber band. If you don't keep tugging hard, it reverts to its former shape. The crusading governor leaves office or the dynamic superintendent gets fired. The elastic snaps back. Few changes remain. This has partly to do with public education's feisty and obdurate interest groups. (Note that teacher unions are relatively weak in Texas and North Carolina, both "right to work" states.) It has partly to do with the education profession's view that children are more like wild flowers to be left to blossom than rose bushes in need of cultivation. And it has much to do with parents, who generally believe that someone else's little darling must study harder and somebody else's school needs to be transformed.

For a nation that has long placed education reform atop its list of urgent priorities, it's striking how superficial most of the reforming has been so far. Yes, nearly every state has written academic standards and installed a testing program. But most states find it exceedingly difficult to enforce their standards by "holding back" the children who don't meet them, denying diplomas to those who fail the exit tests, ridding schools of ineffective teachers, firing inept principals and closing bad schools.

Washington has now inserted itself big time into "standards-based" reform with the mammoth "No Child Left Behind" act - its first anniversary was the occasion of much White House hoopla this week-that sets myriad rules and timelines for test-giving, progress-measuring and intervening. But even as we observe hundreds of conscientious educators and local officials gearing up to give NCLB implementation their very best shot (five states had their accountability plans okayed yesterday) we see too many states and districts balking at - or simply ignoring - some of its key provisions, protesting its rigid schedules, even softening their previous achievement standards to boost the odds that more kids will attain them. This past autumn's sorry experience with making districts provide educational alternatives for youngsters stuck in failing schools hints at the trouble ahead. Certainly the vexed history of federal education interventions says Uncle Sam will find it hard to effect changes in places that don't want to change. (NCLB will likely be a valuable boost for those that do want to change and some that are wavering.) Washington has remarkably little clout. It doesn't contribute much of the money-and is reluctant to withhold even those small sums. Beyond jawboning and sun-lighting, there's not a lot the feds can do if Vermont, Kansas or Louisiana (or St. Louis, Birmingham or Cleveland) doesn't behave as it's supposed to or goes through the motions but fails to deliver the desired results.

Standards-based reform is not the only kind that hasn't yet borne much fruit. There's also the education marketplace with its boldly different theory of change: competition and choice, via charter schools, outsourced management, home-schooling, vouchers and a dozen other ways of putting the consumer in charge of key decisions and making schools vie for pupils and revenues. It's a swell theory and it got a needed boost in June when the Supreme Court okayed Cleveland's voucher program. But here, too, the hard parts still lie ahead. The U.S. now boasts nearly 3000 charter schools but too many are doing a punk job of educating children and more than a few face acute management, governance and fiscal problems. Such faltering, in turn, emboldens enemies of choice to crack down on the charters' freedoms, curb their numbers and generally allow the rubber band to snap back. Hence realizing the promise of charter schools may turn out to be as hard as remaking the public school "system".

Private management firms are also having a rough go of it. School systems keep changing their minds about "outsourcing", they insist on contractual conditions that block vital changes in the schools they do entrust to private managers (e.g. no replacing of teachers), and the firms themselves display mixed academic results even as their reddish balance sheets spook investors. This, too, is an idea with immense potential but far from having proven itself.

What about vouchers, then? The evidence suggests that helping disadvantaged black children switch from bad public schools to decent private schools yields a rise in their achievement. But it doesn't seem to do much for poor white and Latino youngsters. In any case, there aren't enough private schools to go around and it's uneconomic to build more unless the vouchers are amply funded. Education's private sector has not shown a lot of entrepreneurial energy, either. Moreover, if one thinks the politics of other school reforms are daunting, gaze upon the voucher battlefield. The unions and their allies will fight this one to the death - and few political leaders have the guts to defy them.

Results-based accountability and school choice aren't the only education reforms that stick in establishment craws. Try paying teachers according to the subjects they teach or their effectiveness in the classroom. Try bringing into that classroom instructors who didn't pass through colleges of education. (That's why most states' "alternate certification" schemes are tiny - and the ed schools are doing their utmost to seize control of them, too.) Try introducing modern technology (e.g. distance-learning and "virtual education") instead of spending the money on salaries. Try lengthening the school year or day. Watch the rubber band snap back.

Though it seemed hard at the time, what we've done so far under the reform banner was a cakewalk compared with the next steps. We've made many moves that allow for change to occur, yet naught will come of this until millions of individuals actually alter their behavior, until thousands of institutions amend their ingrained practices, until the alternatives win the freedom to be truly different - and those in charge pay as much attention to their effectiveness as to their existence.

What's a governor to do? Faced with ballooning health care costs, shrinking budgets and escalating college tuitions, what chance is there to pay for the summer schools that might get more kids up to speed, for bonuses for great teachers or technical assistance for charter schools? The logical way to fund such improvements is to close bad schools, put those that remain onto year-round schedules, lay off bad teachers and make the sports program pay for itself. But who needs such misery?

What's a president to do? In recent days, newspapers have printed innumerable lists of urgent issues awaiting the 108th Congress but I've yet to see any that mention education. You won't lose money betting that enforcement of No Child Left Behind in reluctant states and clueless districts will be the job of the Education Department while celebrations of NCLB's success will continue to be held at the White House. As for other initiatives, instead of pricey and contentious moves to reshape special education, build merit and accountability into college student aid, press for full-bore voucher demonstrations or assault the teacher unions, the President's team is apt to focus on appealing, low-cost, low-conflict initiatives such as better teaching of math and civics. We need those, too, of course. But they won't transform our schools.

There's simply not much payoff in a democracy from hassling people to do things they don't want to do and defying powerful interest groups on behalf of nebulous future gains. Particularly as election campaigns rev up and candidates and political parties vie for the "education reformer" crown, don't expect public officials and wannabees to inflict more pain on parents, students or teachers, especially when the budget won't allow them to offset the discomfort with new education goodies. Hence as the school-reform lifting gets heavier, we may not see much leadership coming from the usual places. Tax cuts and prescription drugs are so much more appealing.

Welcome to education reform circa 2003.

School districts across the country are having an easier time finding and keeping qualified teachers at the very time that shortages were expected to grow more severe. According to recent news reports, many teacher recruitment forums have been packed, which observers attribute to the downturn in the economy (which makes stable teaching jobs more attractive), a desire for meaningful work after September 11, and higher starting salaries in many districts. A new emphasis on recruiting and retention also seems to be paying off. Shortfalls continue of teachers for special ed, math, and science, and in inner cities and rural areas. "Quality Counts 2003," released by Education Week this week (and reviewed in next week's Gadfly) takes a close look at efforts across the 50 states to find qualified teachers, particularly in high-poverty areas.

"NY teacher shortfall no longer exists," Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, January 3, 2003

"Big teacher gap now filling in," by Mark Sappenfield, Christian Science Monitor, December 25, 2002

"Quality Counts 2003," Education Week, January 9, 2003

The New York Times recently gave lavish attention to a "study" conducted by Arizona State University's David C. Berliner and Audrey L. Amrein, and funded by the teachers' unions, that purports to show that high-stakes tests don't promote student learning. In fact, however, the Times has called our attention to a perfect example of how not to study high-stakes testing. Along the way, it has helped mislead the nation as to the actual impact of one of the most important education reform strategies now underway.

Senior author Berliner has long opposed high-stakes testing, and he and his colleague leave readers in no doubt as to their views on the subject. They provide a tendentious history of the high-stakes testing movement in which, to take only one example, the perception that U.S. schools aren't providing an adequate education is said to have originated not from the system's faltering performance, but rather from public fears of Soviet technological superiority after the launch of Sputnik. They also inform us that advocates of high-stakes testing "derive satisfaction" from "punishing the slackers" in the public education system. This theme will not surprise followers of Berliner's repeated Panglossian efforts to say that U.S. K-12 schools are basically doing OK and that those who say otherwise are enemies of public education.

The authors make much of the finding that states with many low-performing poor and minority students are more likely to adopt high-stakes accountability testing. This fact, however, is as unsurprising as it is encouraging: states in greatest need of educational improvement are most likely to adopt school reforms. But in Amrein and Berliner's Looking Glass education world, such moves are cause for alarm rather than applause. "If these high-stakes tests are discovered not to have their intended effects," they warn, "the mistake will have greater consequences for America's children of color" and for "America's poorest children." By this logic, we should be very careful never to do anything to help poor minority students get a better education, because if we make a mistake it will hurt them most.

The authors even manage to portray one of high-stakes testing's greatest strengths--its ability to expose and quantify the failure of inner-city schools to provide a decent education to poor and minority students--as an oppressive menace. Acknowledging the persistence of an "achievement gap between wealthy, mostly white school districts and poor, mostly minority school districts," they accuse high-stakes exams of "testing poor students on material they have not had a sufficient opportunity to learn." Back through the Looking Glass: one could hardly imagine a more conclusive argument in favor of high-stakes tests, which expose the shameful failure of inner-city schools to provide their students with decent educational opportunities. If disadvantaged youngsters are held back because they fail a high-stakes test, but pass the next year (or the following year) after having learned basic reading and math skills that they lacked before, one might expect a sense of accomplishment: high-stakes testing has forced the school to provide those students with a real education.

The rest of the study doesn't improve much upon this unpromising start. The authors' goal is to measure whether higher scores on high-stakes tests represent improvements in "real learning," or just the transfer of school effort away from real learning and towards narrow skill training and test prep. To gauge this, they measure the performance of students on four exams--SAT, ACT, AP and NAEP-- before and after the introduction of high-stakes testing in their states. They find that the introduction of high-stakes tests is not associated with gains on any of these external exams.

The first problem with this should be obvious: three of the four exams are taken only by college-bound students. Just a third of all high school students take the SAT and fewer take the ACT and AP tests. What's more, the students that statewide regimens of high-stakes testing are mainly intended to help--low-performing youngsters who often lack even the most basic skills--are precisely those who are least apt to take college entrance exams. The main point of high-stakes testing as a reform strategy is to push schools to provide a decent education to those toward the bottom of the class, those in danger of graduating without even rudimentary reading and math skills. It's not to boost the scores of the minority of students who are already doing so well that they're applying to college.

That leaves just the NAEP scores. Here Amrein and Berliner face another problem: NAEP is only given in intermittent years and wasn't given at all at the state level before 1990. Several of the states they study adopted high-stakes testing well before 1990, so any beneficial effects of high-stakes testing may have occurred before NAEP existed as a state-level barometer. As for the rest of the states, the years in which high-stakes tests were adopted don't line up with the years in which NAEP was given, making it difficult to use NAEP to reliably audit the effects of other tests. (This will, to some degree, be improved in future years by the testing requirements and calendars of No Child Left Behind.) Amrein and Berliner try to paper over this problem by imputing data for years in which they have none; this, however, assumes that year-to-year changes in NAEP scores occur along smooth, gradual lines, when the whole point is to study how the introduction of high-stakes testing affects annual changes in NAEP scores.

It is possible to undertake an empirical examination of whether high-stakes tests produce "real learning" that can be detected in the results of other tests. The correct approach would be to compare scores on high-stakes tests with scores on similar broad-based standardized tests (rather than college entrance exams) given at the same time (rather than intermittently). Such an analysis could be done with school-level test data, rather than with the crude state-level test data used by Amrein and Berliner; it could measure scores every year and thus accurately track year-to-year changes; and it could compare similar student populations rather than comparing the general population to the college-bound elite. But that's not what Berliner and Amrein did. What they did, regrettably, is shoddy research that does not warrant the fawning attention of the nation's newspaper of record.

Jay P. Greene is a senior fellow and Greg Forster is a senior research associate in the Manhattan Institute's Education Research Office in Davie, Florida. (www.miedresearchoffice.org).

"The Impact of High-Stakes Tests on Student Academic Performance," Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice, December 2002

"High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning," Education Policy Analysis Archives, March 28, 2002

"Make-or-Break Exams Grow, But Big Study Doubts Value," by Greg Winter, New York Times, December 28, 2002

Merit scholarship programs like Georgia's HOPE scholarships - which pay full tuition and fees at any public university or community college in the state (or an equivalent amount for students attending private institutions) for state residents who maintain a grade point average of 3.0 in high school and college - get criticized because they tend to benefit students from well-off families more than students from low-income families. Several papers presented at the American Economic Association's recent conference have identified other effects of the scholarship programs: they apparently induce college students to take fewer credit hours per semester in order to keep their GPA's above the minimum; they are associated with an increase in attrition rates at some four-year schools, perhaps because they attract some students to universities who might have been better off at community colleges; they have been associated with steep increases in tuition at private universities; and they are associated with an increase in car registrations, possibly because well-off parents bribe their children to attend state universities rather than out-of-state schools by buying them new cars! One defender of the scholarship programs, John Bishop of Cornell University, notes that they are well-targeted to get students to work harder in high school and yield significant gains in the percentage of high school graduates who go on to college.

"Merit-aid programs like Georgia's HOPE scholarships can distort students' incentives, scholars say," by David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2003

Surf to http://www.terry.uga.edu/hope/research.html to read some the papers on HOPE scholarships presented at the AEA conference.

While the President and First Lady celebrated the first anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act at the White House with school principals and superintendents, education leaders, and members of Congress on Wednesday, critics of the law gripe that it will be impossible for states and districts to comply unless the path is greased with $7.7 billion in additional federal education funds. Forty-two Democratic senators have sent a letter to President Bush complaining that NCLB will fail without that sort of budget boost. Meanwhile, five states - Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio - have had their accountability plans approved by the Department of Education. All other states must submit preliminary plans by January 31, 2003. A survey released this week by Americans for Better Education found that 91 percent of Americans support the main goals of NCLB, and that two thirds believe that raising standards and accountability is more important than increasing funding to improve education.

"Education law reaches milestone amid discord," by Michael Fletcher, Washington Post, January 8, 2003

"President Bush celebrates one-year anniversary of No Child Left Behind Act," U.S. Department of Education press release

While some have blamed skyrocketing expenditures for special education on an increase in children with disabilities, it has been hard to find solid evidence that the number of students with certain disabilities has increased; it seems more likely that the diagnosis of those disabilities is what has increased. A recent New York Times article about autism illustrates the problem. While the headline trumpeted "Study Shows Increase in Autism," the study described in the article did not actually demonstrate, or even claim, that there has been an increase in autism. Researchers did find many more children identified as autistic today than in the 1980s but, as the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote in its editorial accompanying the study: "Although it would be tempting to interpret this age trend as indicative of a secular increase in the rate of ASD ... such an explanation is both unlikely and biologically implausible... Rather the authors suggest that these differences might reflect new diagnostic criteria for autism and increased availability of developmental disability services for children with autism during the 1990s." (p. 87) There is a very important difference between a true increase in the prevalence of a disorder and an increase in the identification of people with that disorder. The New York Times article confuses the two, thereby misleading readers.

"Study Shows Increase in Autism," by Sandra Blakeslee, The New York Times, January 1, 2003 (abstract only, full article for purchase)

Eileen Gale Kugler
2002

This book represents the plea of a mother and advocate (who also happens to be a communications specialist) to other parents, urging them to seek out "diverse schools" for their children. Kugler recommends this course of action based largely on her own experience raising two children who attended a large "diverse" high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. According to Kugler, "The academic and personal growth of my children was staggering in this school with students hailing from more than 85 countries, speaking more than 40 native languages." Kugler believes that similar experiences should become the norm for all kids. For children in wealthy suburbs (according to the 2000 Census, Fairfax's median household income is $91,000, the highest in America) of major metropolitan areas, that option may be real and appealing. I say this as a resident of Fairfax County and someone who values the diversity to be found in my neighborhood, the local schools, restaurants, business and cultural scene. Having grown up in a small Midwestern city, however, I know that such diversity is not the norm in much of America. That reality seems not to matter to Kugler, for whom attending a diverse school matters more than attending an effective school. The biggest problem with this book is what happens if you try and take Kugler's logic and apply it to policy. Should communities seek formulas for making schools "diverse," and then bus children across town to make certain the proper "balance" exists in every school? This has been tried in the recent past and caused far more problems than it solved. A better option is to improve all schools while providing all parents - rich and poor - with real choices as to which schools their children can attend. If you want to know more about this misguided book, go to: http://www.scarecroweducation.com.

Gary Miron, Christopher Nelson, and John Risley
The Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University
October 2002

This report appraises charter schools in Pennsylvania five years along, seeking to gauge their impact and provide some recommendations for the future. It provides a wealth of information for people specifically interested in the Keystone State's 90 charter schools. Its value to everyone else is more limited. Regarding the educational performance of the schools, the authors note that, overall, charter pupils are "gaining ground" on traditional public school students (using PSSA scores, filtered for student background factors), though they voice concern that some schools showed great gains while others great losses. They argue that the Commonwealth's accountability arrangements for its charter schools are not yet adequate: to date, just a quarter of them have even been audited. The report also raises some interesting questions that it does not answer. For example, while teacher and parent satisfaction levels in charters are high, are they higher than in conventional public schools? In private schools? Though they find that some charter-style innovations are beginning to appear in public schools, are those public schools improving? Given the great variation in charter school performance, what characteristics do the best ones share? And what, if anything, can be done to develop charter schools in the 73% of Pennsylvania counties that still have none? To access this study, go to http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr.

Linda Darling-Hammond and Peter Youngs
Education Researcher, December 2002

Secretary Paige certainly caused the hive to buzz when he issued his estimable July 2002 report on teacher quality. (You can read it at http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/News/teacherprep/AnnualReport.pdf See also http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=54#802 for the Gadfly's comments on that report.) Its critique of traditional teacher preparation and certification struck hard at the conventional wisdom about boosting teacher quality - a project that has become more urgent in view of NCLB's requirement that every U.S. school child be taught by "highly qualified" teachers not later than 2006. The latest rejoinder was issued in the December issue of the American Education Research Association's Education Researcher by Stanford education professor (and unquenchable protector of the conventional wisdom) Linda Darling-Hammond, joined by Stanford post-doc Peter Youngs. They contend that Paige's conclusions rest on four erroneous arguments, which they seek to debunk in this essay. I don't find theirs a very convincing case - they rehash familiar evidence, much of it old, much of it ambiguous - although the AERA readership will likely lap it up. If you want to see for yourself, you can find it at http://www.aera.net/pubs/er/pdf/vol31_09/AERA310903.pdf.

Jack Jennings, Center on Education Policy
January 2003

Jack Jennings's Center on Education Policy is the source of this report, on the second year of NCLB, a useful service (underwritten by a quartet of foundations) that last month yielded this 240-page document. It does a respectable job of setting forth many relevant facts (as seen from the state education agency perspective) with the predictable amount of editorializing and rationalizing. Because most states responded to the project's survey, the report offers data not previously available. It has four main sections: general "perceptions" of NCLB; testing and accountability; public school choice and supplemental services; and teacher quality. A fifth chapter addresses lesser provisions (scientifically based research, Reading First, English language learners.) The headline version of all this is that states and districts are trying hard and want NCLB to succeed, but that it's painful and costly to implement correctly, mainly because of the huge number of schools being identified as "in need of improvement" (or "corrective action"). A particular grievance: the obligation to assess LEP and disabled youngsters on the same tests and hold them to the same standards is widely viewed as unrealistic. If this isn't dealt with in Washington, says Jennings, "There is a risk of losing the commitment of states and school districts to achieving the Act's goals." One bone to pick: in discussing why NCLB's public-school choice provisions are "rarely used," he fails to note the foot-dragging, resistance, and bureaucratic processes that are a major reason why few families are not yet exercising choice. Maybe that's because of where he got his information. In fact, this report might fairly be termed "NCLB as viewed by state education departments," because that's the perspective it takes and those are the agencies whose views the report's authors seem entirely uncritical of. Still, you'll find much timely information here. See for yourself at http://www.ctredpol.org/pubs/nclb_full_report_jan2003/nclb_full_report_jan2003.htm.