The Education Gadfly Weekly

Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider
Princeton University Press
2007

This thoughtful, scholarly volume probes the District of Columbia's charter-school experience (through 2005-6). It's not a study of school performance as gauged by test scores but, rather, of parental behavior: why families choose the schools they choose, how satisfied are they, why they're more content with some schools than others, how social capital gets built by and around schools, and much more. The findings are mixed--sobering, too--and the authors' comments on education markets are insightful indeed. Quoting from the last page: "While parents must exercise their expanded power to hold charter schools accountable from the bottom, these schools must also be held accountable from the top, by serious efforts to gather evidence about what works and for whom.... If simply unleashing choice and market forces was all that was required, then the results we observe for charter schools should be uniformly better. The problems facing charter schools (which all too often mirror the problems of traditional public schools serving the same communities) suggest that more is at work than simply too much bureaucracy and not enough market competition. Yes, markets are beautiful things, but they don't work without lots of information, without a developed infrastructure, and without an adjudicating and enforcement authority. And charter schools won't work without the corresponding mechanisms necessary to support school choice in an ever-expanding market for education." Indeed. This book (the authors of which currently head the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington) is a welcome contribution to the expanding literature on charter schools. For more information, go here.

Herbert J. Walberg
Cato Institute
August 2007

Herb Walberg's timely primer is an informative who's who and what's what of the world of school choice. Starting from the premise that U.S. schools lag far behind their international counterparts, the book explores both the positive and negative results of school choice experiments. Separate chapters take up various versions of school choice (charter schools, education vouchers, private schools) and external dynamics (geopolitical realities, parental satisfaction). He conducts a thorough review of research on each of these topics--Hoxby, Greene, and Moe are omnipresent--but omits studies he finds less than scientifically rigorous. His compilations of studies on a given subject--the effects of charter school competition on local district schools, for example-- are particularly compelling. Walberg quietly (and not surprisingly) concludes that school choice is a preferable alternative to the traditional public school system. You can find his book here.   

The deadline to submit feedback on Congressmen George Miller's and Buck McKeon's draft NCLB proposal has come and gone. Still, it's never too late to have an impact on the reauthorization debate--if you're Al Shanker, that is. Richard Kahlenberg, whose biography of the late Shanker is now available, believes that, were the former AFT president still living, he would still be a powerful advocate for standards-based reform. But he would voice serious concerns about NCLB version 1.0. Kahlenberg, channeling Shanker, takes particular umbrage at the lack of accountability for students themselves. "Imagine saying we should shut down a hospital and fire its staff because not all of its patients became healthy," Shanker wrote in the early 1990s, "but never demanding that the patients also look out for themselves by eating properly, exercising, and laying off cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs." Unfortunately, rather than taking Shanker's advice and adding consequences for kids, Miller and McKeon seem more likely to subtract sanctions for adults--which means that the "hospital" will remain open, even as the patients grow sicker. Someone send these congressmen a copy of Kahlenberg's new book!

"No Child Left Behind: What Would Al Say?," by Richard Kahlenberg, Education Week, September 5, 2007

Once upon a time, before U.S. schools were desegregated, the District of Columbia's Dunbar High School provided a top-flight education to the city's black elite and future leaders--so much so that families moved to Washington so their kids could go to school there. Over the years, much ink has been spilled reminiscing about the great days of Dunbar and the educational decrepitude that, for the most part, now envelops it. That familiar history was recently subjected to revisionism by Howard University law professor Brian Gilmore, who asserted in the Washington Post that Dunbar was never a place of entirely equal educational opportunity. Throughout the 20th Century, Gilmore says, Dunbar's lighter-skinned African-American pupils were considered "privileged" while dark-skinned blacks were not. Today's Dunbar High School has its high-achievers, its laggards, and its troublemakers, he writes, but so did the Dunbar of the 1930s. Romanticizing the education provided by pre-integration, all-black schools is unwise. On the other hand, plenty of data attests to a decades-long slippage in Dunbar's educational quality, even as the school remained almost 100 percent black. Gilmore concludes by wondering whether we should tolerate polices that allow extreme segregation. He ought instead wonder whether we should tolerate policies that allow shoddy education to be the modern-day norm at Dunbar High School and far too many other places, regardless of who's enrolled.

"Rose-Colored Views of an All-Black School," by Brian Gilmore, Washington Post, September 2, 2007

Economics sage Bob Samuelson (my college classmate, if you're interested) wrote last week a characteristically perceptive column, titled "The Economic Catch-22." Observing that "We are now in the ‘blame phase' of the economic cycle," he asked whether people concerned about present-day volatility, bubble bursts, market gyrations, mortgage defaults, margin calls, housing inventories, and such can legitimately assign responsibility to (take your pick) the Chinese, mortgage bankers, Messrs. Greenspan and Bernanke, credit-rating agencies, etc.

He concludes that, while these and others doubtless bear some responsibility, overall it's a mistake to search for culprits and scapegoats. "What seems to have happened," Samuelson writes, "was a broad and mistaken reappraisal of risk." Just about everyone suffered from a "false sense of confidence" that the U.S. economy "could overcome just about anything." So people and institutions took risks that they ought not have--"irrational exuberance," for sure. Above all, what happened is that they forgot about the business cycle itself: "The very fact that the economy has done well creates conditions in which it may--at least temporarily--do less well. Prosperity inevitably interrupts itself with losses, popped bubbles and recessions." Those who would minimize such downturns need to be more prudential on the upswing--which likely means there will be less short-term upswing--and more realistic in their appraisal of risks.

Meanwhile, though, people took chances precisely because it looked to them as if, in America's robust economy, "everything works," almost nothing craters, and therefore the risks are actually slim.

What, you ask, does this have to do with education? More than you might think. There's a lot of blame-casting in our world, too, a fair amount of risk taking, most of it exactly the wrong kind, and a lousy track record when it comes to "appraising" risk.

The coin of the education realm is, of course, student performance--test scores, graduation rates, and such. Most of the indicators are flat at best; rather than prolonged "prosperity," k-12 education has been in a long-term recession from which it seems unable to emerge. Like Wall Street, we obsess over every wee bump and dip in the measures we typically follow: SAT scores down a bit, NAEP fourth-grade scores up a bit, AYP schools more or less numerous, graduation-test passing rates a hair better (or worse) than last year's, and on and on. Most of these little wrinkles mean nothing, any more than a hundred-point dip or uptick in the Dow. (My grandfather used to say of the stock market: "It goes up and it goes down.") But they rivet our attention and lead to all manner of writings, symposia, hand-wringings, speechifying, sometimes even election outcomes.

Yet the big education picture is precisely the opposite of the big picture presented by the U.S. economy. In the economy, despite bumps, prosperity improves over time. During boom times, it can seem as if everything works. (Never mind the business failures that still occur.) So try some heretofore unknown credit or debt instrument. Make those loans to sub-par home-buyers. Take that chance. Just about everything appears to have a strong chance of succeeding.

In education, by contrast, the results don't change and nothing much seems to work. In part because of our frustration with that flat terrain and our determination to scale some hillsides, educators and policy folks take a number of risks, too. "If nothing has worked so far, let's try something different." So we launch program after program, intervention after intervention, law after law, expenditure after expenditure, innovation after innovation, generally with little or no evidence that it will change the angle of the performance trend line. But we try them anyway. That's risky behavior, indeed, behavior that likely serves to flatten the line.

It is said, in response--I've said this more than once myself--that we ought to try new things in education precisely because the old things aren't working well enough, and that requiring proof-in-advance that the new things will work is tantamount to maintaining the status quo. I guess that qualifies me as a risk-taker. (I customarily add, however, that we should then evaluate the heck out of the innovations that we try.)

But there are smart risks and there are dumb risks. It's a smart risk to mandate a district-wide reading program when there's evidence that the particular program is effective with kids who need it; it's dumb to mandate one that isn't. It's a smart risk to give people choices among schools but foolish to expect them to make wise choices without ample information. It's a smart risk to allow people to start new schools but it's dumb to throw wide the door and let anyone do anything and call it a school. It's a smart risk to create alternatives to conventional teacher certification--but dumb to suppose that any new teacher will thrive in the classroom without mentoring. It's smart to mandate standards but dumb to let everyone set their own--and expect every single kid to attain them.

My sense is that education reform takes far too many dumb risks and not enough smart ones--and that the reason for this behavior is, at least in part, the failure rather than the success of earlier innovations.

As for blame-casting, we in education could easily drown in it. The kids are to blame for their lack of achievement; poverty is to blame; teachers (and teacher unions) are to blame; bureaucrats; parents; textbooks; drugs; TV; obesity; sleep deprivation; segregation; unequal expenditures; too much reliance on technology; too little technology. I could go on and on in this vein. Indeed, I'm reminded of Senate Finance Committee mark-ups thirty years ago when Chairman Russell Long, the legendary Louisiana lawmaker, would recite his favorite ditty about tax policy: "Don't tax you. Don't tax me. Tax the fellow under that tree."

Education loves to blame the fellow under the tree, not you and not me.

In sum: our indicators are flat. We blame the other guy. We take dumb risks. We shun--or don't push ourselves to take--smart risks. We do a thoroughly mediocre job of risk appraisal. And this probably contributes to sustained mediocrity of performance.

On reflection, I'd be delighted to swap America's education problems for its economic travails!

Gadfly doesn't consider himself a moral crusader, much less a moral alarmist. But he is--and The Australian newspaper is his mouthpiece. That's reality according to University of Western Sydney education school professors Wayne Sawyer and Susanne Gannon, who in a recent article accuse the media--that's us--of promoting a "simplistic and demonised version" of whole language reading. They allege that The Australian and its political allies are wrongly rousing the public to "moral panic around literacy instruction in particular, and education in general." Well. Let's check the data. As The Australian pointed out in an editorial, a recent national report found that "a significant minority of children in Australian schools continue to face difficulties in acquiring acceptable levels of literacy." It also found (not uniquely) that phonics programs were notably more effective than whole language programs, which presume that struggling students can more or less teach themselves to read. Sometimes panic isn't such a bad thing--when it pushes us to act.

"‘Panic' over whole language," by Justine Ferrari, The Australian, September 4, 2007

"Reading the riot act," The Australian, September 5, 2007

Do not come to school in Indianapolis with your trousers sagging, your shirttail fluttering or your logo-flaunting apparel. For you shall be turned away. The city has just adopted a strict dress code. High school students, for example, must wear solid-colored shirts, either in white or their school's official color. Pants should be tan, black, or navy; go gray and go home. We're not sure what to make of these rules. For one, they encourage monochromatic ensembles, which worked for Michael Jackson and Regis Philbin but won't for the average 17-year-old. Nonetheless, we're sympathetic to the Indianapolis school leaders. Sir Richard Steele once wrote (in 1711 in The Spectator) that "The most improper things we commit in the conduct of our lives, we are led into by the force of fashion." Thus, a subdued dress code may occasion subdued behavior in the classroom, which in turn may catalyze some actual learning. That, or everyone will simply look dull.

"IPS buttons down its dress code," by Andy Gammill, Indianapolis Star, September 5, 2007

The last several years have witnessed an explosion in the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses--a laudable trend, on the whole. The College Board, though, is worried that its AP label might be losing integrity because of the program's rapid expansion, so the organization is auditing AP courses to ensure that their syllabi and lessons are up to snuff. That well-intended review process may, however, be penalizing some of the better AP classes (and teachers) out there. David Keener teaches biology and was recently told that his curriculum didn't meet AP standards. Yet, none of his students scored below a ‘3'--the passing grade--on the 2007 AP biology exam. (In another instance, several teachers reportedly turned in the same syllabus to be graded; some of them were deemed acceptable, others weren't. The College Board said such scenarios are extremely rare.) The College Board is right to defend the rigor of its brand. But if most of a class's students make the grade on AP's challenging tests, it indicates that the teachers are doing a fine job. (That's precisely how Jaime Escalante became known as the best teacher in America.) Why not focus the College Board's magnifying glass on classrooms where most students aren't even taking--much less passing--the tests? Why not let the kids' results determine the worth of the teacher's syllabus (and pedagogy)? To do otherwise is akin to making grandma take off her shoes at the airport x-ray machine: It's just for show, and only leads to frustration.

"Auditors Rejecting AP Course Syllabuses", by Jay Mathews, Washington Post, September 2, 2007

Herbert J. Walberg
Cato Institute
August 2007

Herb Walberg's timely primer is an informative who's who and what's what of the world of school choice. Starting from the premise that U.S. schools lag far behind their international counterparts, the book explores both the positive and negative results of school choice experiments. Separate chapters take up various versions of school choice (charter schools, education vouchers, private schools) and external dynamics (geopolitical realities, parental satisfaction). He conducts a thorough review of research on each of these topics--Hoxby, Greene, and Moe are omnipresent--but omits studies he finds less than scientifically rigorous. His compilations of studies on a given subject--the effects of charter school competition on local district schools, for example-- are particularly compelling. Walberg quietly (and not surprisingly) concludes that school choice is a preferable alternative to the traditional public school system. You can find his book here.   

Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider
Princeton University Press
2007

This thoughtful, scholarly volume probes the District of Columbia's charter-school experience (through 2005-6). It's not a study of school performance as gauged by test scores but, rather, of parental behavior: why families choose the schools they choose, how satisfied are they, why they're more content with some schools than others, how social capital gets built by and around schools, and much more. The findings are mixed--sobering, too--and the authors' comments on education markets are insightful indeed. Quoting from the last page: "While parents must exercise their expanded power to hold charter schools accountable from the bottom, these schools must also be held accountable from the top, by serious efforts to gather evidence about what works and for whom.... If simply unleashing choice and market forces was all that was required, then the results we observe for charter schools should be uniformly better. The problems facing charter schools (which all too often mirror the problems of traditional public schools serving the same communities) suggest that more is at work than simply too much bureaucracy and not enough market competition. Yes, markets are beautiful things, but they don't work without lots of information, without a developed infrastructure, and without an adjudicating and enforcement authority. And charter schools won't work without the corresponding mechanisms necessary to support school choice in an ever-expanding market for education." Indeed. This book (the authors of which currently head the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington) is a welcome contribution to the expanding literature on charter schools. For more information, go here.