The Education Gadfly Weekly

Innocenti Research Centre, UNICEF
November 2002

UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre is the source of this new international comparison of "educational disadvantage" in the world's most prosperous countries - up to two dozen of them, depending on the specific indicators and benchmarks. These are not new data. The report is drawn from familiar sources such as TIMSS and PISA. But the data are analyzed differently here, not according to national averages but, rather, the severity of the discrepancy within each country between middle-scoring and bottom-scoring students (and other "gap" measures). On the main table, a composite of five separate measures "of absolute educational disadvantage" (mostly at age 15), the United States is 7th "worst," followed by Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal. Seventeen countries did better, led by Korea and Japan. The main policy point: wealthy countries have educationally disadvantaged kids, too, but a lot of them have done better than we have at gap-closing. You can download your own copy of this 36-page report at http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/repcard4e.pdf.

J. Martin Rochester
November 2002

University of Missouri (at St. Louis) political scientist J. Martin Rochester authored this fine new book on America's education woes. It's semi-autobiographical, recounting his own efforts - as a "battle-scarred parent" - to get his children a good education in the public schools of University City and Clayton, Missouri. He also chronicles his growing disillusionment with educational progressivism. A political liberal, he nonetheless found that "The more I have seen of progressive pedagogy at work, the more disenchanted I have become. The utter failure of our schools under progressive rule has provoked a backlash, as the public has called for increased standards and accountability. This in turn has produced a backlash against the backlash, mounted by educators on the defensive." In 315 well-wrought pages, he closely examines the ideas undergirding progressive education and finds them flawed and unproven. This, then, is a book about ideas as much as about Rochester's adventures in education-land. It winds up with some imaginative suggestions, including the use of education options as a way to let several different philosophies coexist and to enable people to pick the one they favor. Highly recommended. The ISBN is 1893554538 and the publisher is Encounter Books. You can get more information at http://www.encounterbooks.com/clwa/clwa.html.

Jay P. Greene and Greg Forster, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute
December 2002

Reformers who want the upcoming reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to focus on results rather than funding have a new piece of ammunition. The Manhattan Institute's prolific Jay Greene and Greg Forster have released a report arguing that the rapid rise in special education enrollments nationwide is largely due to perverse financial incentives created by the "bounty system" - whereby most states pay school districts more money for each student diagnosed with a disability. Greene and Forster reach their conclusion by examining the rates of special ed enrollment growth in states with and without the bounty system. Overall, they find that financial incentives account for 62 percent of the increase in special ed enrollments in bounty states during the 1990s. Interestingly, although nearly thirteen percent of all students are in special ed, enrollments for the most objectively diagnosed and expensive-to-treat disabilities have declined or remained flat over the past quarter century. The skyrocketing growth in special ed has been confined to the learning disability subcategory, which is least expensive to treat and most subjective to diagnose. The authors maintain that this is no coincidence. Their solutions? Dump the bounty system, have the federal government audit special ed placements (in districts with especially high or low enrollments of disabled kids) and provide vouchers to disabled students - a la Florida's McKay Scholarship Program - so that labeling a student "disabled" does not automatically translate to more money in school coffers. Just thirteen pages short, this report packs a powerful policy punch. You'll find it at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_32.htm.

edited by Marc S. Tucker and Judy B. Codding
2002

How would you respond if your boss approached you and said, "I have a job for you. You will be fully responsible for how your unit performs, but you will only have marginal authority over the people who work for you. You can't fire them, you can't give them bonus pay, and you can't put your best performers in the toughest situations. And, by the way, you will have to work longer hours for the same rate of pay." Most people would say, "fuggedaboutit." Yet this is the reality facing school principals across the United States. No wonder many are bailing out. Worse, according to The Principal Challenge, is that "the pool of candidates willing to replace them is drying up at an alarming rate," a school leadership crisis that worsens with time. This hefty book, edited by Marc Tucker and Judy Codding of the National Center on Education and the Economy, examines the problems surrounding recruitment, retention and remuneration of high quality school leaders, particularly those in urban and rural areas. It terms utterly dysfunctional the current system for preparing and developing school principals for the challenges of leading schools in the 21st century, which resembles education schools doing their own thing. Wasteful, too. For example, states often provide teachers with tuition support to get their principal certification (allowing them to move up the pay scale), yet most of these folks have no intention of actually becoming principals. Tucker and Codding see the solution to the leadership crisis in a new form of professional development similar to that of the National War College, which chooses whom to train, rather than allowing candidates to nominate themselves. There is much in this book to consider, including the experience of other countries, the experience of business and the military in developing leaders, and the importance of ethical leadership. But the volume is flawed, too. It neglects to examine the experience of charter school principals, who already have many of the freedoms that successful school leaders need. (For more on that topic, see Fordham's report, "Autonomy and Innovation: How do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom?" by Bill Triant, December 2001, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=18.) To learn more about The Principal Challenge, see http://www.josseybass.com/cda/product/0,,0787964476,00.html. Its ISBN is 0-7879-6447-6.

Brian Rowan, Richard Correnti, and Robert J. Miller, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
November 2002

A recent report from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) analyzes the research on teacher effects - how much impact teachers have on student achievement - and what accounts for differences in teacher effectiveness across classrooms. The authors test a series of hypotheses about the size and stability of teacher effects and about which teachers are most effective. They use data from the Prospects study, a major evaluation of the Title I program that included test scores for students in a large sample of U.S. elementary schools. The report's most important contribution is its lengthy discussion of the conceptual and methodological problems of research on teacher effects. For example, the authors caution analysts against using simple survey measures or simple descriptors - like certification level or advanced degrees - as proxies for teacher characteristics or instructional technique. The report concludes that teacher effects on student achievement may appear small unless a sophisticated statistical model is used to control for other factors, including the teaching environment, student characteristics, and a student's previous achievement level. There is evidence that teacher experience, whole-class instruction (as opposed to working with individual students), and solid coverage of the curriculum are positively related to growth in student achievement; however, any given teacher will vary in effectiveness when teaching different subjects or working with students from different socio-economic backgrounds. This report is available at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rr51.pdf.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern recently called upon President Bush, come January, to seize his "unprecedented opportunity" to create a pilot voucher program for poor kids trapped in the District of Columbia's dismal schools. Doing so, contends Stern, would produce a domino effect, encouraging the creation of voucher programs and quickening the pace of reform in other metropolises. In a Cato Institute Policy Analysis, Casey Lartigue fleshes out the need for choice in the nation's capital, which he dubs "the worst of the worst" for its bottom-dwelling test scores. Given that per-pupil expenditures are already among the highest in the country, he argues, only a heavy dose of competition and parental empowerment can turn the city's schools around. See "S.O.S. - Save Our Schools," by Sol Stern, The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2002 (subscribers only), and "The Need for Educational Freedom in the Nation's Capital," by Casey J. Lartigue Jr., Cato Institute, December 10, 2002.

Among the predictable questions that arise during just about every discussion of school choice is one along these lines: "We live in a rural community and there's no other school within forty miles. How could school choice possibly benefit our children? We have enough troubles making ends meet and keeping our school open."

Many towns with faltering Title I schools used a similar excuse this past autumn for NOT providing public-school choice to their students, despite the NCLB requirement that they do so. "We only have one junior high school," went the argument, "so it's not possible to offer intra-district school choice to those students."

How compelling is this claim? What can school choice mean in rural and thinly populated parts of the country, in communities with just one or two schools, and in places where a humongous "consolidated" school seems to suck all the oxygen from the education air?

I can think of at least five forms of school choice that can "work" under such circumstances. (Readers are invited to suggest more.) The contention that nothing is possible thus reveals either a failure of imagination or a mischievous attempt to drive a nail into the coffin in which some seek to entomb school choice.

First and most obvious, allow kids to choose public schools in nearby districts. At least a dozen states already give families the right to select any public school in the state. Even where that's not the case, NCLB says - and the recent Education Department regulations emphasize - that small districts with persistently failing Title I schools are supposed to make every practicable effort to arrange for students to opt into schools run by other districts. In the NCLB case, the "sending" district is also obliged to provide transportation and may use Title I dollars for this purpose.

Second, deploy some form of voucher to enable children to enroll in private schools - in their own community or nearby. This already happens in parts of northern New England, where small towns, instead of operating their own high schools, "tuition" their youngsters into the public or private schools of their choice. (Here's a link to an article about Maine's program, which is limited to secular schools: http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-066es.html.) Though rural America is not awash in private schools, it has some-including boarding schools that also take "day students"-and might have more if education funding were portable and could be used in this way.

Third, encourage charter schools. Although there aren't huge numbers of rural charters, I've seen enough of them operating successfully in the Colorado mountains, the Arizona desert, the Minnesota woods (e.g. the celebrated Minnesota New Country School, www.mncs.k12.mn.us/about/about.htm) and the California canyons to know that this is possible. The "Annenberg Rural Challenge" gave this development a boost and it continues in such organizations as the Colorado Rural Charters Network (http://www.ruralcharters.org/). Few places are more rural than Idaho, which now boasts some fifteen charter schools open or on the way. (See http://csi.boisestate.edu/icsn/idaho_charters.htm.) Alaska is also making good use of this opportunity to bring educational innovations and improvements into remote places. (See http://www.uscharterschools.org/cs/uscsp/query/q/129?state=Alaska&x-title=Profiles+of+Alaska+Charter+Schools and http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/spring01/alaska.html.)

Fourth, run multiple schools under the same roof, like a cinema multiplex. "Schools within schools" are not a new idea. That's how public-school choice in East Harlem got started, with kids changing schools by climbing the stairs within the same building. But this could also work in rural America - maybe not in wee village primary schools but surely in those big "consolidated" schools. Of the ten new "specialized" public schools that opened in the Bronx this year, seven are operating within the walls of larger public schools. Medina, Ohio has four high schools functioning in a single building. Why couldn't something similar happen in the middle of Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina or Montana? A child might attend a "math-science" school in one wing of the building or switch to an "arts and humanities" school in another. One mini-school might emphasize Core Knowledge while a second does Expeditionary Learning.

Fifth, make use of distance learning and "virtual" education. These were made to order for rural America because they don't require the child to move at all. Staying right at home - or at the neighbors', the day-care center or a parent's workplace - a youngster can change schools by changing the URL on his computer screen. Sure, especially for small children, there also needs to be a competent adult nearby, but if the "virtual" program is solid, the adult-in-the-room-with-the-kid need not be a full-fledged teacher. And older pupils can do a great deal of virtual learning on their own.

This isn't a new idea, either. "Correspondence" courses were invented ages ago for youngsters lacking ready access to an acceptable brick-and-mortar school. In the Australian outback and remote corners of the Falkland Islands, classes delivered by radio have been available for decades. Today, though, the Internet makes so much more possible. The "APEX" program beams Advanced Placement courses into high schools that lack the staff or enrollments to provide their own and now offers customized virtual school programs as well. (See http://www.apexlearning.com.) Florida has a statewide virtual high school (http://www.flvs.net/). Virtual charter schools are proliferating from Pennsylvania and Ohio to California, Colorado and Idaho, as several firms develop Internet-delivered education programs and as more families - some but by no means all of them former "home schoolers" - discover this way to bring a strong curriculum into their living rooms, even if they live on the remotest mountain top or at the end of a dirt road. (Full disclosure: I'm on the board of one such firm, a terrific outfit known as K12 and led by former Education Secretary William Bennett. See http://www.k12.com/.)

In sum, education choice makes at least as much sense - and is now as feasible - for rural America as for inner cities and suburbs. The "no other school within forty miles" argument should be seen for what it is: a herring as red as Rudolph's nose.

"E-classes help small schools keep pace with urban peers," by Jeff Ballinger, Contra Costa Times, October 19, 2002

"Schools Adapt Old Lesson: Share and Share Alike," by Marek Fuchs, The New York Times, September 18, 2002

States are edging closer to compliance with No Child Left Behind but are a long way off in some areas, according to an Education Week survey conducted for the paper's forthcoming (January '03) Quality Counts 2003 report. In the absence of timely guidance from the Department of Education, states "appear to have taken a wait-and-see attitude about changing their accountability systems or their requirements for teacher licensures." More rapid progress has been made in instituting annual testing in reading and math in grades 3-8; 19 states and the District Columbia have such a regimen in place in advance of the 2005-06 deadline. For more survey results, see "States Strive Toward ESEA Compliance," by Lynn Olson, Education Week, December 11, 2002.

Students in Anglican and Roman Catholic schools bested their public-school counterparts on this year's national English, math and science exams, new figures from the British Department of Education show. The data, known as "primary league tables," reveal the percentage of 11-year-olds in each school who achieve proficiency on the tests, as well as allow parents to compare schools' performance from year to year. "Church schools show the way to high standards for 11-year-olds," Daily Telegraph, December 5, 2002

Although still a minority at roughly twelve percent, college presidents hired from outside traditional academic circles have doubled in number in recent years according to a new study by the American Council on Education (ACE). College board members seem to be figuring out that many of the skills required of a president - including fundraising, politics, marketing, and financial management - can readily be gained outside higher education. Why doesn't the same logic apply to primary-secondary schooling? For a summary of the report, see "More Colleges Are Hiring Presidents from Outside Academe," by Julianne Basinger, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 9 (subscribers only). Copies of the full report, "The American College President: 2002 Edition," can be ordered for $25 each plus $6.95 shipping and handling by calling 301-632-6757.

In a move aimed at bringing the Big Apple into compliance with NCLB, Chancellor Joel Klein announced this week that students may transfer from continually failing schools to better ones anywhere in the city instead of being limited to choices within their local districts. The city will investigate ways to increase capacity at its best schools, including expanding class sizes and opening "more innovative schools in every neighborhood." (Klein yesterday announced another smart idea: the creation of a training institute for new principals that may recruit candidates from business and other non-traditional backgrounds. For details, see http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/education/11UNIO.html.) Meanwhile, the screws are tightening on school transfers in the nation's capital. According to a Washington Times editorial, a task force has recommended that the DC Board of Education toughen transfer requirements by "restricting the number of students in all public schools and establishing lotteries for transfer students instead of the first-come, first-accepted open policy" now in place. The task force also recommends allowing public - yes, public - school principals to reject would-be transfer students based on their academic achievement. "Policy Eases the Way Out of Bad Schools," by Abby Goodnough, The New York Times, December 9, 2002, and "Free D.C. schoolchildren," The Washington Times, December 8, 2002.

* * * * *

The Department of Education this week offered draft non-regulatory guidance on the school-choice provisions of No Child Left Behind. Says the department's press release, "The guidance provides general information and answers questions about how to implement the choice provisions, who is eligible to take advantage of the new options, how, when and what to tell parents about their choice options, and what types of schools should be involved." The guide also addresses issues surrounding special education, desegregation plans, general funding and transportation funding. See http://www.ed.gov/PressReleases/12-2002/12092002.html.

Test prep firms such as Princeton Review and Kaplan have always been popular among students preparing for college entry exams, but these companies are now pitching their services to a younger crowd - elementary and junior high students - thanks to NCLB. Critics denounce the pricey tutoring as just one more edge that wealthy students have over poorer youngsters, even as advocates hope it will narrow the achievement gap by giving children who are lagging behind a chance to catch up on materials they should have learned in school. In a piece for The Washington Monthly, Siobhan Gorman takes a look at the burgeoning "kiddie test prep" industry and finds that - in contrast to the gimmicky test-taking skills taught to older students - its emphasis is on teaching and learning. Since NCLB offers money to pay for it, tutoring represents poor kids' best shot at a decent education, Gorman concludes. See "Tutor Restoration," The Washington Monthly, December 2002.

Brian Rowan, Richard Correnti, and Robert J. Miller, Consortium for Policy Research in Education
November 2002

A recent report from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) analyzes the research on teacher effects - how much impact teachers have on student achievement - and what accounts for differences in teacher effectiveness across classrooms. The authors test a series of hypotheses about the size and stability of teacher effects and about which teachers are most effective. They use data from the Prospects study, a major evaluation of the Title I program that included test scores for students in a large sample of U.S. elementary schools. The report's most important contribution is its lengthy discussion of the conceptual and methodological problems of research on teacher effects. For example, the authors caution analysts against using simple survey measures or simple descriptors - like certification level or advanced degrees - as proxies for teacher characteristics or instructional technique. The report concludes that teacher effects on student achievement may appear small unless a sophisticated statistical model is used to control for other factors, including the teaching environment, student characteristics, and a student's previous achievement level. There is evidence that teacher experience, whole-class instruction (as opposed to working with individual students), and solid coverage of the curriculum are positively related to growth in student achievement; however, any given teacher will vary in effectiveness when teaching different subjects or working with students from different socio-economic backgrounds. This report is available at http://www.cpre.org/Publications/rr51.pdf.

edited by Marc S. Tucker and Judy B. Codding
2002

How would you respond if your boss approached you and said, "I have a job for you. You will be fully responsible for how your unit performs, but you will only have marginal authority over the people who work for you. You can't fire them, you can't give them bonus pay, and you can't put your best performers in the toughest situations. And, by the way, you will have to work longer hours for the same rate of pay." Most people would say, "fuggedaboutit." Yet this is the reality facing school principals across the United States. No wonder many are bailing out. Worse, according to The Principal Challenge, is that "the pool of candidates willing to replace them is drying up at an alarming rate," a school leadership crisis that worsens with time. This hefty book, edited by Marc Tucker and Judy Codding of the National Center on Education and the Economy, examines the problems surrounding recruitment, retention and remuneration of high quality school leaders, particularly those in urban and rural areas. It terms utterly dysfunctional the current system for preparing and developing school principals for the challenges of leading schools in the 21st century, which resembles education schools doing their own thing. Wasteful, too. For example, states often provide teachers with tuition support to get their principal certification (allowing them to move up the pay scale), yet most of these folks have no intention of actually becoming principals. Tucker and Codding see the solution to the leadership crisis in a new form of professional development similar to that of the National War College, which chooses whom to train, rather than allowing candidates to nominate themselves. There is much in this book to consider, including the experience of other countries, the experience of business and the military in developing leaders, and the importance of ethical leadership. But the volume is flawed, too. It neglects to examine the experience of charter school principals, who already have many of the freedoms that successful school leaders need. (For more on that topic, see Fordham's report, "Autonomy and Innovation: How do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom?" by Bill Triant, December 2001, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=18.) To learn more about The Principal Challenge, see http://www.josseybass.com/cda/product/0,,0787964476,00.html. Its ISBN is 0-7879-6447-6.

Innocenti Research Centre, UNICEF
November 2002

UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre is the source of this new international comparison of "educational disadvantage" in the world's most prosperous countries - up to two dozen of them, depending on the specific indicators and benchmarks. These are not new data. The report is drawn from familiar sources such as TIMSS and PISA. But the data are analyzed differently here, not according to national averages but, rather, the severity of the discrepancy within each country between middle-scoring and bottom-scoring students (and other "gap" measures). On the main table, a composite of five separate measures "of absolute educational disadvantage" (mostly at age 15), the United States is 7th "worst," followed by Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal. Seventeen countries did better, led by Korea and Japan. The main policy point: wealthy countries have educationally disadvantaged kids, too, but a lot of them have done better than we have at gap-closing. You can download your own copy of this 36-page report at http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/repcard4e.pdf.

J. Martin Rochester
November 2002

University of Missouri (at St. Louis) political scientist J. Martin Rochester authored this fine new book on America's education woes. It's semi-autobiographical, recounting his own efforts - as a "battle-scarred parent" - to get his children a good education in the public schools of University City and Clayton, Missouri. He also chronicles his growing disillusionment with educational progressivism. A political liberal, he nonetheless found that "The more I have seen of progressive pedagogy at work, the more disenchanted I have become. The utter failure of our schools under progressive rule has provoked a backlash, as the public has called for increased standards and accountability. This in turn has produced a backlash against the backlash, mounted by educators on the defensive." In 315 well-wrought pages, he closely examines the ideas undergirding progressive education and finds them flawed and unproven. This, then, is a book about ideas as much as about Rochester's adventures in education-land. It winds up with some imaginative suggestions, including the use of education options as a way to let several different philosophies coexist and to enable people to pick the one they favor. Highly recommended. The ISBN is 1893554538 and the publisher is Encounter Books. You can get more information at http://www.encounterbooks.com/clwa/clwa.html.

Jay P. Greene and Greg Forster, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute
December 2002

Reformers who want the upcoming reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to focus on results rather than funding have a new piece of ammunition. The Manhattan Institute's prolific Jay Greene and Greg Forster have released a report arguing that the rapid rise in special education enrollments nationwide is largely due to perverse financial incentives created by the "bounty system" - whereby most states pay school districts more money for each student diagnosed with a disability. Greene and Forster reach their conclusion by examining the rates of special ed enrollment growth in states with and without the bounty system. Overall, they find that financial incentives account for 62 percent of the increase in special ed enrollments in bounty states during the 1990s. Interestingly, although nearly thirteen percent of all students are in special ed, enrollments for the most objectively diagnosed and expensive-to-treat disabilities have declined or remained flat over the past quarter century. The skyrocketing growth in special ed has been confined to the learning disability subcategory, which is least expensive to treat and most subjective to diagnose. The authors maintain that this is no coincidence. Their solutions? Dump the bounty system, have the federal government audit special ed placements (in districts with especially high or low enrollments of disabled kids) and provide vouchers to disabled students - a la Florida's McKay Scholarship Program - so that labeling a student "disabled" does not automatically translate to more money in school coffers. Just thirteen pages short, this report packs a powerful policy punch. You'll find it at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_32.htm.