The Education Gadfly Weekly

The Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education
June 22, 2006

Yesterday, Secretary Spellings's commission on the future of higher education met to review the draft of its final report that had leaked a few days earlier. No accounts of the meeting have yet reached us but Gadfly is sure that agitated commissioners sought to excise some of the stinging truths and bold recommendations contained in this outstanding document submitted by chairman Charles Miller. (It's now clear that Spellings erred when she named so many "stakeholders" to this group. Stakeholders can almost never acknowledge that anything is wrong with the current system, and they abhor criticism.) Sadly, the final report, due in September, is unlikely to be quite as memorable or quotable. Thus, it makes sense to treat this superb, readable, hard-hitting yet constructive draft report as if it were the commission's last word. Read it and you will discover a clear statement of the big problems that beset U.S. postsecondary education today: constrained access, spiraling tuition, too much remediation, weak outcomes, limp accountability, and meager information. You will find blunt "nation at risk" prose explaining why, if the country doesn't address these problems (and transcend its smug and complacent defensiveness about the present higher ed system), its future is in jeopardy. And you will find six and a half pages of sensible recommendations spelling out what needs doing by whom. Bravo for Miller for telling the truth about the higher ed emperor's tattered raiments and designing a much-needed new wardrobe for him. One hopes other commissioners won't opt to keep the rags they've got. You can find it here. You can find coverage of it here. And you can learn more about the commission itself here.

The Graduation Project 2006
Education Week/ Editorial Projects in Education
June 22, 2006

If Diplomas Count--the first in a series of special Education Week reports about graduation rates--is any indication, the light on graduation rates is about to get even hotter. This report features a close look at nationwide graduation totals; a powerful online mapping technology that lets users view graduation data at national, state, and district levels; and an examination of state graduation policies and how they obfuscate the problem by fudging dropout numbers. Diplomas Count estimates that some 70 percent of students receive a regular diploma (not a GED) within four years of high school. This figure is consistent with those from the National Center for Education Statistics (7.5 in 10 receive a diploma) and Jay Greene and Marcus Winters (7 in 10), and at odds with the Economic Policy Institute (8 in 10), and many states who report numbers over 80 or even 90 percent. The report analyzed the percentage of 9th graders who completed high school four years later. And though forced to adjust for missing data--such as grade retention and transfers in and out of a district or state--its methodology is reasonable. The report describes wide variation in state graduation requirements and argues that national graduation numbers have more gaps than a hockey player's grin: racial/ethnic gaps, socioeconomic gaps, gender gaps, and regional gaps. The good news (there is some) is that educators are getting better at identifying students at risk of dropping out, and some communities are developing promising intervention strategies to stanch the dropout flow. You can read it (and play around with the interactive online features) here.

New York has seen much mud-slinging and blame-shifting this week as the charter crowd seeks to explain why the legislature had the chutzpah to complete work on the state budget without raising the statewide charter-school cap from 100 to 150 schools, as urged by both Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki. Democratic legislators, led by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and deeply in the pocket of the teachers' union and other established interests, were dead set against more charter schools. The main statewide charter advocacy group decided to play hardball (like everyone else in Albany) and launched a series of gutsy (if inflammatory) radio and television ads against hostile Assembly members. Silver and his cohorts went ballistic, some of them saying they wouldn't even discuss the charter school issue unless the ads were pulled. This led more accommodating members of the charter movement--if Tories in Thatcher's England, they'd have been termed "wets"--to seek to placate Silver. Had alleged charter allies in the State Senate and governor's office been firmer of backbone, Silver and the union might have been routed. In the event, the budget as passed includes no easing of the charter cap. It does, however, also include (and omit) some items that need further work by the legislature later this year, leaving some future leverage in the Governor's hands. We'll see if he wields it. Gadfly thought the attack ads were marvelous and wishes they'd started earlier and been meaner. For now, however, lots of young New Yorkers who yearn to attend charter schools, and would-be charter operators pining to create superior educational opportunities for them, have been dissed and ditched by their lawmakers.  

"Legislature Deals Setback to Mayor in Declining to Allow More Charter Schools," by Jennifer Medina, New York Times, June 24, 2006

"The wrong way to argue for charter schools," by Frederick M. Hess, New York Daily News, June 26, 2006 

"Last-ditch Effort Set to Lift Cap on Schools," by Jacob Gershman, New York Sun, June 22, 2006

When buying fireworks this weekend, don't forget to throw a box of birthday candles into your shopping basket. It's the 40th anniversary of the Coleman Report, which was released Fourth of July weekend 1966 to "deafening silence." Why the tepid initial response? Partly because folks were busy looking skyward at brocades and blasts, and partly because in the Great Society era, the report's most vivid finding-that a student's family background affected academic results more than schools-didn't go down well. Many of Coleman's discoveries remain pertinent today (for example, teachers' verbal abilities are tied to higher student test scores), while others have been disputed (schools, and especially teachers, matter quite a lot, it turns out, and some are far more effective than others). Its greatest legacy is the use of test data to measure academic outcomes and school performance--a novelty among ed researchers at the time. It highlighted achievement gaps and shocked Americans into acknowledging that often, even in the midst of well-meaning efforts, some students aren't learning enough. "The Coleman Report," says economist Eric Hanushek (who in his youth participated in a Moynihan-led "faculty seminar" at Harvard that reanalyzed these data), "changed the perspective to concentrating on student performance, and that has endured." We'll light a Roman Candle to that.

"Race Report's Influence Felt 40 Years Later," by Debra Viadero, Education Week (subscription required), June 21, 2006

Once upon a time, Jonathan Kozol played a formative and constructive role in my career. Death at an Early Age, his evocative tale of the tribulations of inner-city school children and the trials of a novice Boston teacher, appeared in 1967--two years after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, three years into the War on Poverty, and just as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. It strengthened my resolve to plunge into the icy, swirling waters of education reform.     

Since then, I've learned a lot about what makes schools (and kids) tick and what sorts of reforms have a chance of transforming American K-12 education into an enterprise that, in fact, leaves no child behind.         

Alas, Kozol has learned nothing. He's been writing the exact same stuff for four decades, blaming the woes of urban education (and urban kids) on racism, inadequate spending and, of late, testing. (See the expert unmasking of Kozol by Marcus Winters in the spring 2006 issue of Education Next.)

Kozol's latest crusade is to strike a blow at standards-based reform in general and NCLB in particular. On June 16, he circulated an update written for those "Education Activists who have asked me: where do we go next?"

Kozol's answer: he's formed a new group called "Education Action" in order "to fight racism and inequality and the murderous impact of the NCLB legislation ... with the goal of mobilizing educators to resist the testing mania and directly challenge Congress, possibly by a march on Washington, at the time when NCLB comes up for reauthorization in 2007." 

He notified his mailing list that Education Action is now headquartered in a house that "we've purchased for this purpose" (but which also seems to be Kozol's home address) in a lovely, leafy neighborhood of Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off high-rent Brattle Street and a few short blocks from Harvard Square. The perfect place from which to crusade for equality.

"We are already in contact," he wrote, "with our close friends at Rethinking Schools, with dozens of local action groups like Teachers for Social Justice in San Francisco, with dynamic African-American religious groups that share our goals, with activist white denominations [whatever that may mean], and with some of the NEA and AFT affiliates, in particular the activist caucuses within both unions such as those in Oakland, Miami, and Los Angeles. But we want to extend these contacts rapidly in order to create what one of our friends who is the leader of a major union local calls a massive wave of noncompliance."

A massive wave of noncompliance, huh? Just what disadvantaged American school kids need. That will surely close the learning gap and guarantee them basic skills and core knowledge. But there's more. Kozol and his allies are also "determined that we turn the growing, but too often muted and frustrated discontent with NCLB and the racist policies and privatizing forces that are threatening the very soul of public education into a series of national actions that are explicitly political in the same tradition as the civil rights upheavals of the early 1960s. We want to pull in youth affiliates as well and are working with high school kids and countless college groups that are burning with a sense of shame and indignation at the stupid and destructive education policies of state and federal autocrats."

The phrase "time warp" doesn't quite do justice to this view of education--and of politics. It may be more like profound cynicism blended with self-aggrandizement. Kozol has grown wealthy by selling books to educators and speaking at their conferences. Now he's joining--even seeking to lead--the anti-NCLB backlash among educators, all the while waving his familiar flag of racism and injustice, yet refusing to offer any plausible alternatives for fixing our failing urban schools.

If he has his way, those inner city kids will stay ignorant forever--and he can keep penning outraged (but best-selling) books about their mistreatment at society's hands. Where's the real injustice in this picture?

Dumb liberal ideas in education are a dime a dozen, and during my time as superintendent of Houston's schools and as the United States secretary of education I battled against all sorts of progressivist lunacy, from whole-language reading to fuzzy math to lifetime teacher tenure. Today, however, one of the worst ideas in education is coming from conservatives: the so-called 65 percent solution.

This movement, bankrolled largely by Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com, wants states to mandate that 65 percent of school dollars be spent "in the classroom." Budget items like teacher salaries would count; librarians, transportation costs and upkeep of buildings would not.

Proponents argue that this will counter wasteful spending and runaway school "overhead," and they have convinced many voters--a Harris poll last fall put national support at more than 70 percent. Four states--Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana and Texas--have adopted 65 percent mandates and at least six more are seriously considering them.

The only drawback is that such laws won't actually make schools any better, and could make them worse. Yes, it's true that education financing is a mess and that billions are wasted every year. But the 65 percent solution won't help. The most likely outcome is that school officials will learn the art of creative accounting in order to increase the percentage of money that can be deemed "classroom" expenses.

More ominously, it will tie school leaders' hands at a time when they need more freedom to innovate. Things we should be stressing, like teacher training, online content to supplement lessons, and after-school tutoring, would not fall under "classroom expenses."

What we need is a 100 percent solution, a reform that tackles America's antiquated education financing system, gives dynamic school leaders more freedom, fosters true equity, and opens the door wider to school choice.

Our schools are failing our most at-risk students. Only 30 percent of eighth graders are "proficient" or "advanced" in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Math scores are nearly as bad. The No Child Left Behind Act is helping, by focusing attention on our neediest students, but it will succeed only if we recognize that certain children require more resources to educate than others.

Most children living in poverty, for example, need longer school days and years, better teachers and materials, and extra services like tutoring.

A second problem is that as we enter a new era of choice-driven schooling, with a growing menu of options from charter schools to virtual schools to cross-district choices, the old budgeting model is getting in the way. Charter schools, for example, receive on average only 80 cents on the dollar compared to traditional schools. A million children attend charter schools, but in most places we essentially tell them that their education is worth considerably less than that of their friends in district-run schools.

Instead of gimmicky fads, we need fundamental reforms. One good idea now picking up support is "weighted student funding." Under this approach, each child receives a "backpack" of financing that travels with him to the public school of his family's choice. The more disadvantaged the child, the bigger the backpack.

When that money arrives at a school, principals have freedom to spend it as they see fit. Does the school need to pay more to snag a top-notch math teacher? Are extra hours needed to allow for intensive tutoring? Principals would be able to allocate resources accordingly; accountability systems like No Child Left Behind give them strong incentives to make good decisions.

What about reducing administrative waste, the primary aim of the 65 percent solution? Weighted financing handles this better, too: because principals are given full control over their budgets, they can choose whether to forgo a new coat of paint--or, better, consultants and travel expenses--in favor of an additional classroom aide.

Weighted student financing was pioneered in Edmonton, Alberta, in the 1970s and has now been tried in a handful of cities including Houston, San Francisco, and Seattle. These experiments have shown considerable promise. In Edmonton, education reforms based on a weighted system helped turn the city's struggling public schools into some of Canada's finest-80 percent of students regularly score at or above grade level on standardized tests.

Perhaps the best thing about weighted student financing is that it's a reform both liberals and conservatives can support. Liberals should like the extra investment in needy children; conservatives should appreciate its positive effects on deregulation and school choice. That's why Democrats like John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and former Gov. Jim Hunt of North Carolina have joined Republicans like me and former Education Secretary Bill Bennett in supporting weighted financing. When it comes to educating our children, we should all put politics aside.

This article originally appeared in the June 27 New York Times.

Aphorist Dorothy Parker once observed, "Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city." Similarly diffuse and divided is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's latest plan to take over L.A. Unified. His wheeling and dealing with teachers unions to save his flailing bid to become education boss threatens to undermine the entire project. Re-read that sentence and you can understand why; after all, the most compelling argument for mayoral control is to diminish the Politburo-like power that urban teacher unions exert over elected school boards. The details coming out of Sacramento are troubling. One reported compromise, for example, would allow each campus to set its own curriculum. As departing L.A. Superintendent (and former Colorado governor) Roy Romer rightly points out, "It sounds great until you learn that about one in four of our students change schools in any given year." Another part of Villaraigosa's original vision lost in his deal-making is a clear line of accountability for schools. Under the new plan, L.A.'s superintendent would report to both the Board of Education and the new "Council of Mayors." Who's in charge? Everyone, which means no one, sort of like the District of Columbia, a fine model of urban education success. In L.A., as we understand it, the latest version of the Mayor's plan would have the superintendent set the school budget, the mayor review it, and the board set overall budget categories. All the while, principals and teachers are developing 72 different curriculum sets. Angelina and Brad must be wondering: how are Namibia's schools?

"Roy Romer: The mayor's bad deal," by  Roy Romer, Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2006

The Graduation Project 2006
Education Week/ Editorial Projects in Education
June 22, 2006

If Diplomas Count--the first in a series of special Education Week reports about graduation rates--is any indication, the light on graduation rates is about to get even hotter. This report features a close look at nationwide graduation totals; a powerful online mapping technology that lets users view graduation data at national, state, and district levels; and an examination of state graduation policies and how they obfuscate the problem by fudging dropout numbers. Diplomas Count estimates that some 70 percent of students receive a regular diploma (not a GED) within four years of high school. This figure is consistent with those from the National Center for Education Statistics (7.5 in 10 receive a diploma) and Jay Greene and Marcus Winters (7 in 10), and at odds with the Economic Policy Institute (8 in 10), and many states who report numbers over 80 or even 90 percent. The report analyzed the percentage of 9th graders who completed high school four years later. And though forced to adjust for missing data--such as grade retention and transfers in and out of a district or state--its methodology is reasonable. The report describes wide variation in state graduation requirements and argues that national graduation numbers have more gaps than a hockey player's grin: racial/ethnic gaps, socioeconomic gaps, gender gaps, and regional gaps. The good news (there is some) is that educators are getting better at identifying students at risk of dropping out, and some communities are developing promising intervention strategies to stanch the dropout flow. You can read it (and play around with the interactive online features) here.

The Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education
June 22, 2006

Yesterday, Secretary Spellings's commission on the future of higher education met to review the draft of its final report that had leaked a few days earlier. No accounts of the meeting have yet reached us but Gadfly is sure that agitated commissioners sought to excise some of the stinging truths and bold recommendations contained in this outstanding document submitted by chairman Charles Miller. (It's now clear that Spellings erred when she named so many "stakeholders" to this group. Stakeholders can almost never acknowledge that anything is wrong with the current system, and they abhor criticism.) Sadly, the final report, due in September, is unlikely to be quite as memorable or quotable. Thus, it makes sense to treat this superb, readable, hard-hitting yet constructive draft report as if it were the commission's last word. Read it and you will discover a clear statement of the big problems that beset U.S. postsecondary education today: constrained access, spiraling tuition, too much remediation, weak outcomes, limp accountability, and meager information. You will find blunt "nation at risk" prose explaining why, if the country doesn't address these problems (and transcend its smug and complacent defensiveness about the present higher ed system), its future is in jeopardy. And you will find six and a half pages of sensible recommendations spelling out what needs doing by whom. Bravo for Miller for telling the truth about the higher ed emperor's tattered raiments and designing a much-needed new wardrobe for him. One hopes other commissioners won't opt to keep the rags they've got. You can find it here. You can find coverage of it here. And you can learn more about the commission itself here.