The Education Gadfly Weekly

United States Government Accountability Office
September 2004

The GAO (now officially the "Government Accountability Office") is the source of this appraisal of Executive Branch implementation of NCLB, which reveals vast state-by-state variability on multiple dimensions and describes some gaps in the Education Department's handling of that situation. Enclosed in the report is a five-page response by Deputy Secretary Eugene Hickok that disputes several of GAO's main conclusions and says that most of the recommended changes are either underway or unnecessary.

Much of the argument centers on the fact that the Department had given "full approval" to just 28 state NCLB plans by July 31, while the rest had been "approved with conditions." Moreover, "17 states did not have approved academic standards and testing systems in place" two and a half years after NCLB was signed - and the Department "did not have a written process to track that states are taking steps toward meeting the conditions set for full approval. . . . ."

That's a typical GAO criticism. But the more interesting and worrying information in this report has to do with inter-state variability on many dimensions of NCLB and with the accuracy of reporting data. "[T]he percentage of students expected to meet proficiency goals in the first year varied widely. . . . States also varied in the minimum size of designated groups...[and] in the percentage of students they expected to be proficient annually . . . [and] in how they planned to determine whether their schools met state goals." The big question going forward: can federalism work this way in education? Has NCLB left too much discretion to states? Or possibly too little? Is this a national law or fifty laws? And has the Education Department got the capacity to manage so complex and multifaceted a process? You'll find it here.

"Archaic architecture, creaky machinery," by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Education Gadfly, August 26, 2004

Kevin Carey, The Education Trust
Fall 2004

The Education Trust's Kevin Carey is the author of this 17-pager contending that, despite any number of "equity" and "adequacy" lawsuits and ceaseless increases in education spending, many states still spend less per student in high-poverty districts than in more prosperous communities. These data are from 2001-2 and use state and district revenues only. Various adjustments are involved. EdTrust's bottom line: half the states spend less per pupil in high-poverty districts and 31 states spend less in high-minority districts. On the other hand, the remaining states, for the most part, spend more in such districts. For example, while Illinois and New York spend less, Massachusetts, and New Jersey spend more in poor/minority districts. EdTrust goes on to say that it actually costs 40 percent more to educate a poor kid (basing that figure on a formula found in an obscure section of NCLB) and that, when state funding is calculated accordingly, 36 states under-fund their high poverty, high minority districts. As for recent changes, according to Carey's calculations, 27 states "shrunk their gaps" between 1997 and 2002 while gaps widened in 22. Not surprisingly, he urges states to take various steps to eradicate those gaps and provide adequate resources to schools with needy kids. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I note that a lot of high-poverty places that are also high spending (e.g. the District of Columbia, Newark) are providing kids with a miserable education. Spending is not irrelevant, but how the money is spent matters more. You can find the report online here.

Dennis Evans, Editor, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
2005

As the title suggests, this book offers views from both sides of scads of education issues, such as classroom discipline, service learning, school uniforms, sex education, and religion in schools. Many of these twenty topics are of interest to teachers, principals and others who make decisions about how to run classrooms and schools; others have broader policy implications, such as home schooling and common curricula. The forty chapters - one on each side of every issue - come from a variety of sources: articles in Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, and Education Week, and papers by the Heritage Foundation, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, even the Fordham Foundation, to name just a few. The authors are also a varied bunch, from Tom Loveless and Mike Podgursky to Gary Nash and Alfie Kohn. It even includes opposing court decisions from Justices Thomas and Ginsberg, arguing the legality of drug testing in schools. The book's strength is its balance, as it enables the reader to understand the arguments and begin to appraise the tradeoffs on these issues. It's exasperating, though, that in this format even the weakest of arguments must be given equal time; the one page summaries following each point-counterpoint exchange are loath to favor one side over the other - even when both sides aren't making equally compelling arguments. Also, parts of the book are dated (this is the second edition and just two chapters were originally written within the last two years). Still, the topics and selections are generally interesting and it could prove to be a useful resource. (An instructor's manual and other tools are available for those who wish to use it in the classroom). The ISBN is 1550-6916 and you can learn more here.

There's new Europe and old Europe, and now there's the new education philanthropy and the old education philanthropy, according to Rick Hess in Philanthropy magazine. The old version focused on working within the system and making nice with school districts and assorted education interest groups - and much of it expired with Walter Annenberg's failed challenge. The new education philanthropy seeks to shake up the system, work from the outside in, and spur needed reforms opposed by entrenched interests: consider, for example, the approaches taken by the Gates, Walton, Pisces, Broad, and Milken foundations. As just one sign of how quickly new philanthropy has supplanted old, consider this: in 1998, the top four K-12 funders were the Annenberg, Lilly, Packard, and Kellogg foundations - old philanthropists all. Just six years later, the top two are Gates and Walton, which together account for one-quarter of all K-12 giving among the top 50 foundations.

"Re-tooling K-12 giving," by Frederick M. Hess, Philanthropy, September-October 2004

"Making it count: A guide to high impact education philanthropy," by Kelly Amis and Chester E. Finn, Jr., Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, September 1, 2001

"Jumpstarting the charter movement," The Philanthropy Roundtable

Presidential election campaigns bring out the worst in academics whose partisan yearnings overcome their scholarly scruples.

The past week brought a spectacular specimen of this sorry genre from Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller, who, on October 7, loosed a "study" that armed the Kerry-Edwards campaign with misleading information about post-NCLB reading scores in key states. Hours later, Senator Kerry pulled the pin and hurled it:

Just yesterday, the President said, because of his education reform, reading scores are increasing in our public schools. Well, ladies and gentlemen, a new study released today says that is just plain not true. The facts are that [in] 11 out of our largest 15 states, reading scores are flat or have gone down.

One can't help but recall four years ago when, weeks before the election, a RAND analyst released a "study" purporting to show that achievement gains in Texas were not as rosy as then-Governor Bush claimed. (It was rebutted by, among others, another RAND analysis.)

The initial press release for Fuller's study was issued on the letterhead of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a generally respectable outfit co-located on the campuses of Berkeley, Stanford, and UC-Davis and underwritten by the Hewlett Foundation. Fuller is one of its three co-directors. Stanford's eminent Michael W. Kirst is another. The "contact person" named in the release was PACE's director of government relations. The core "finding" reported therein was that "no consistent pattern of gains in children's reading skills can yet be detected since passage of the 'No Child Left Behind' reforms.  In 11 of the 15 major states surveyed, youngsters' reading scores were flat or have declined since the Bush reforms were enacted."

It was transparently clear that this "study" was intended to undercut administration claims about post-NCLB education gains. A footnote quoted several statements by the President and Secretary Paige. And in case its political significance and timeliness weren't obvious, another footnote reminded readers that education is the fourth most important issue on voters' minds this fall.

Fuller, moreover, went on to publish a long opinion piece in the latest Education Week, titled "Are Test Scores Really Rising? School Reform and Campaign Rhetoric." It is blatantly partisan, aimed at deflating Bush balloons and inflating Kerry charges that NCLB isn't working and Bush doesn't deserve credit as an education reformer. The commentary is based on the PACE "study," described by Fuller as a "new compilation by scholars from the Stanford-University of California research institute Policy Analysis for California Education."

Any number of things about this are fishy, starting with the fact that PACE's normal beat is California, not the nation. But the smelliest thing is that the study is wrong in its overall conclusion and wrong for most of the fifteen states selected (by curious criteria) for review. As Hoover institution scholars Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond pointed out, using Fuller's own data, 11 of the fifteen states in this sample actually improved their reading scores between 2001 (or, in California's case, 2002) and 2004, and three others were flat. Only in Texas was there a decline, and that state dramatically toughened its tests during this period, making longitudinal comparisons dicey.

Education Secretary Rod Paige termed the study "deeply flawed . . . riddled with assumptions, rough approximations, and inaccuracies." Going Hanushek and Raymond one better, he concluded that "the numbers PACE selected show that test scores are up in 14 of the 15 states they analyzed."   

A dozen educators (myself included) characterized Fuller's work as "misleading at best and outrageous at worst."

Fuller, however, appears undaunted. He writes that not only are current results nothing to crow about, but that "Washington's long-term influence on children's learning curves will diminish until the deeper constraints facing many schools are confronted: rising levels of child poverty, sinking teacher salaries, and unions that turn a blind eye. . . ."

He got the union part right, but instead of drawing the obvious political conclusion - that a Kerry victory will strengthen and embolden those very unions - he goes on primarily to bash Bush and suggest that Kerry (though "half-hearted" in some respects and murky in others) would be better for education because he'll spend more.

Professor Fuller is free to express his views about candidates and vote however he likes. He's a partisan Democrat - one early job was on the staff of then-governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown - as well as an oft-quoted critic of charter schools and veteran testing skeptic. (The press release named several other prominent test critics as "experts available to comment.")

It was, however, the PACE connection that lent credibility to Fuller's rant and lifted it from a single leftist professor's opinion toward the status of scholarship worthy of attention.

Yet in a singular development, PACE itself has disavowed the Fuller study. I've no idea what happened behind the scenes, but over the weekend PACE began to back-pedal. Stanford's Kirst e-mailed a number of people, saying that it was not actually a PACE study, just Fuller's work, and a clarification would be issued.

And indeed it was, on Monday. The three PACE co-directors, Fuller included, put out a three-paragraph statement saying the "compilation of state reading scores" was solely the work of "Fuller and his research team" and that a mysterious "administrative error" had led to its being attributed to PACE.

Presumably under pressure from his colleagues, Fuller made a stab at correcting the study's attribution in Education Week. But by then it was too late to change the print edition and the on-line version, while not naming PACE in the author's byline, contains in its text the PACE linkage quoted above.

In any case, by then Kerry had this anti-Bush weapon in hand and was using it. Only within the academy would PACE's disavowal of Fuller's work even be noticed.

Why did this happen? There's no doubt that PACE's leading lights are Democrats (though Kirst is an honorable, astute, and scrupulous scholar who was apparently blindsided, then mortified, by Fuller's actions). There's no doubt that PACE's principal financial backer has its education program led by a prominent Democrat. There's no doubt that Education Week, though customarily even-handed and well edited, draws much of its financial support from national foundations that would love to dance on the grave of George W. Bush. One doesn't have to be paranoid to see how all this could have come together - not, I think, in a conspiratorial sense, so much as in a complicit suspension of critical scrutiny, editorial skepticism, and internal controls when a well-timed "study" looked as if it would be good for Kerry-Edwards and bad for Bush-Cheney. Add the sheer fame and visibility, warranted or no, that was bound to attend such a "study," and it would be difficult for any academic, foundation, or editor to resist. The possibility of celebrity, however fleeting (or unwarranted), is catnip to the scholarly temperament.

In the long run, however, this sort of thing deepens the doubts that just about everyone outside the ivy-covered walls harbors toward academics in general and education research in particular. It reduces the odds that those purporting to "speak truth to power" will be heard. And it does no good for children who deserve better than they're getting from today's schools and those who "study" them.

"Are test scores really rising?" by Bruce Fuller, Education Week, October 13, 2004

"Statement on reading score trends by Bruce Fuller, Patricia Gandara, and Michael Kirst, PACE co-directors," PACE press release

National Alliance of Black School Educators and Education Trust Recognize Recent Progress in Public Education, press release, Education Trust

How do you teach kids to write: through the spirit or the law? That is, should writing be taught through careful attention to grammar, syntax, and composition? Or should the first task be encouraging youngsters to pour their hearts upon the page without regard for subjects, verbs, and objects? While hedging its bets just a bit, Educational Leadership lines up with the latter view this month, in a series of articles on teaching writing. As editor Marge Scherer assures us, "Log into a blog or two or sneak a peek at students' instant messaging and you will find that the art of writing is alive and well. The voice, the substance, the interest, and the humor are there, even if the grammar, the spelling, and the topic sentences are often not." This is not a worthwhile trade, in our opinion. (And we have to wonder if Scherer has ever seen many actual instant messages, which usually read something like, "WU? WAN2TLK DIS WKND?" In fact, teachers are beginning to complain that IM-speak is making its way into formal essays, even among college students.) We tend to take the former view, that style and panache are the product of careful mastery of the rules, and that one good way to master them is to learn how to diagram sentences. So we were amused to read novelist Kitty Burns Florey's witty reminiscence of diagramming sentences in elementary school. Gadfly spent many years diagramming under the stern tutelage of nuns, and is a better writer for it. As it turns out, style, interest, and humor in writing actually do have something to do with knowing - if not necessarily always following - the rules.

"Sister Bernadette's barking dog," by Kitty Burns Florey

"Writing!" Educational Leadership, October 2004

"Keeping slang out of student's homework," by Andrea Perry, Daily Ardmoreite, September 24, 2004

This weekend, French thinker Jacques Derrida, father of the literary method known as "deconstruction," died of pancreatic cancer. His wide-ranging influence on intellectual life on this planet even trickled down into K-12 education, where it has inspired some of our wackier and less responsible pedagogical theorists.

For Derrida, nothing external to language could be truly conveyed through language. That is, words refer not to things, but to other words, a view that undermines the traditional assumption that literature directly reflects and interprets reality. His dissections of important texts in the Western tradition were undeniably the work of a powerful intellect. However, critics often accused him of willful obscurity, nihilistic punning, and other sordid crimes against the Western tradition. One of Derrida's own descriptions of the deconstructive method may serve as evidence for the prosecution:

And "deconstructions," which I prefer to say in the plural, has no doubt never named a project, a method, or a system. Especially not a philosophical system. Within contexts always very well defined, it is one of the possible names used to designate, in sum by metonymy, what occurs, or cannot manage to occur, namely a certain dislocation which in effect reiterates itself regularly - and wherever there is something rather than nothing: within what is classically called the texts of classical philosophy, of course and for example, but also within any "text," in the general sense which I try to justify for this word, that is to say in plain experience, in the social, historical, economic, technical, military, and so on "reality." For instance, the event of the so-called Gulf War is a powerful, spectacular, and tragic condensation of these deconstructions.

Phew! Sounds like a page from the Education Policy Analysis Archives. And in fact, the jargon-loaded absurdity of much contemporary education scholarship owes a great deal to Derrida and his fellow French web-spinners. But their influence is more than rhetorical. These post-structuralist thinkers, Derrida perhaps most prominent among them, are godparents of the notion that K-12 education is primarily about inculcating in the young a desire for social activism and an awareness of how society is shot through with oppression. The notion that children need to decode the narratives, hidden in all literary works, that reinforce society's underlying power structures, is a bastard child of these French thinkers - and is alive and well in our ed schools.

To be sure, at some level all pedagogy is political; Plato covered this 2,500 years ago. However, a more moderate (and honest) approach, and one infinitely more helpful to children, would train teachers to focus on facts, deal carefully with controversial topics, and understand that grappling with texts should be taught as a skill, not a means for social action.

Derrida probably would have scoffed at some of the ways in which his ideas have been co-opted by education professors. But bastard children are children nonetheless, and such theories must therefore be counted as part of Derrida's legacy.

As part of the New York Times' all out assault on education reform this election year, the editorial board (which has yet to retract or correct its misleading editorial on the AFT charter report--click here and here for more) put forward another series of misleading and contradictory arguments on Sunday entitled "How to rescue education reform." The core of the Times' argument is that the Bush administration undermined NCLB "when it saddled the states with new responsibilities and shortchanged them by $6 billion." We've covered this argument before (click here). Bottom line: the editorial writers assume that states will choose unnecessarily expensive assessment mechanisms and achieve no efficiencies in their implementation of NCLB. (It's also worth recalling that they're getting $4 billion in additional federal funds to cover such costs.) Now, the Times uses the GAO's recent report (reviewed below) to argue that the administration has been lax in its oversight of state implementation of NCLB, a critique not evidently shared by state departments of education and legislators now howling about the federal intrusion due to NCLB. "Part of the problem," the editors complain, "is the lingering presumption that public schooling is largely a 'local matter' - even when states contravene the national interest by doing a horrendous job." So, is the Times now for a national education ministry to run the schools? Perhaps. We're not. Yes, they're right that portions of NCLB are ill-drafted, that states are exploiting some loopholes in that statute, and that the administration sometimes lets them get away with it. In the Times's words, "the Department has blithely accepted bogus graduation rates and unrealistic progress schedules, and simply rolled over for plans that depict teacher preparation as just fine - when the whole country knows that the teacher corps, especially in poor areas, is riddled with unqualified and inexperienced people." True. But it's also true that some states are failing to live up to their responsibilities by providing those bogus data, unrealistic schedules, and loophole-riddled plans. If states, which bear constitutional responsibility for educating their people, insist on not doing so, nobody in Washington is going to be able to make them. The Times's solution is to "provide the states with the money it promised and build the capacity and authority that the Education Department needs to further reform." Which sounds ominously like underwriting misbehavior by the states and building an even larger federal bureaucracy.

"How to rescue education reform," New York Times, October 10, 2004

Dennis Evans, Editor, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
2005

As the title suggests, this book offers views from both sides of scads of education issues, such as classroom discipline, service learning, school uniforms, sex education, and religion in schools. Many of these twenty topics are of interest to teachers, principals and others who make decisions about how to run classrooms and schools; others have broader policy implications, such as home schooling and common curricula. The forty chapters - one on each side of every issue - come from a variety of sources: articles in Educational Leadership, Phi Delta Kappan, and Education Week, and papers by the Heritage Foundation, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, even the Fordham Foundation, to name just a few. The authors are also a varied bunch, from Tom Loveless and Mike Podgursky to Gary Nash and Alfie Kohn. It even includes opposing court decisions from Justices Thomas and Ginsberg, arguing the legality of drug testing in schools. The book's strength is its balance, as it enables the reader to understand the arguments and begin to appraise the tradeoffs on these issues. It's exasperating, though, that in this format even the weakest of arguments must be given equal time; the one page summaries following each point-counterpoint exchange are loath to favor one side over the other - even when both sides aren't making equally compelling arguments. Also, parts of the book are dated (this is the second edition and just two chapters were originally written within the last two years). Still, the topics and selections are generally interesting and it could prove to be a useful resource. (An instructor's manual and other tools are available for those who wish to use it in the classroom). The ISBN is 1550-6916 and you can learn more here.

Kevin Carey, The Education Trust
Fall 2004

The Education Trust's Kevin Carey is the author of this 17-pager contending that, despite any number of "equity" and "adequacy" lawsuits and ceaseless increases in education spending, many states still spend less per student in high-poverty districts than in more prosperous communities. These data are from 2001-2 and use state and district revenues only. Various adjustments are involved. EdTrust's bottom line: half the states spend less per pupil in high-poverty districts and 31 states spend less in high-minority districts. On the other hand, the remaining states, for the most part, spend more in such districts. For example, while Illinois and New York spend less, Massachusetts, and New Jersey spend more in poor/minority districts. EdTrust goes on to say that it actually costs 40 percent more to educate a poor kid (basing that figure on a formula found in an obscure section of NCLB) and that, when state funding is calculated accordingly, 36 states under-fund their high poverty, high minority districts. As for recent changes, according to Carey's calculations, 27 states "shrunk their gaps" between 1997 and 2002 while gaps widened in 22. Not surprisingly, he urges states to take various steps to eradicate those gaps and provide adequate resources to schools with needy kids. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, I note that a lot of high-poverty places that are also high spending (e.g. the District of Columbia, Newark) are providing kids with a miserable education. Spending is not irrelevant, but how the money is spent matters more. You can find the report online here.

United States Government Accountability Office
September 2004

The GAO (now officially the "Government Accountability Office") is the source of this appraisal of Executive Branch implementation of NCLB, which reveals vast state-by-state variability on multiple dimensions and describes some gaps in the Education Department's handling of that situation. Enclosed in the report is a five-page response by Deputy Secretary Eugene Hickok that disputes several of GAO's main conclusions and says that most of the recommended changes are either underway or unnecessary.

Much of the argument centers on the fact that the Department had given "full approval" to just 28 state NCLB plans by July 31, while the rest had been "approved with conditions." Moreover, "17 states did not have approved academic standards and testing systems in place" two and a half years after NCLB was signed - and the Department "did not have a written process to track that states are taking steps toward meeting the conditions set for full approval. . . . ."

That's a typical GAO criticism. But the more interesting and worrying information in this report has to do with inter-state variability on many dimensions of NCLB and with the accuracy of reporting data. "[T]he percentage of students expected to meet proficiency goals in the first year varied widely. . . . States also varied in the minimum size of designated groups...[and] in the percentage of students they expected to be proficient annually . . . [and] in how they planned to determine whether their schools met state goals." The big question going forward: can federalism work this way in education? Has NCLB left too much discretion to states? Or possibly too little? Is this a national law or fifty laws? And has the Education Department got the capacity to manage so complex and multifaceted a process? You'll find it here.

"Archaic architecture, creaky machinery," by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Education Gadfly, August 26, 2004