The Education Gadfly Weekly

Articles by Frederick M. Hess, Linda Nathan, Joe Nathan, Ray Bacchetti, and Evans Clinchy, Phi Delta Kappan
February 2004

This month Kappan offers six essays examining and debating the notion of "public" schooling. Rick Hess frames the discussion - and offers the most interesting insights - by penning the opening article and a rejoinder. In the middle are four pieces from teachers and scholars offering varying views on Hess's arguments. His central point is that we need not constrain our definition of a "public" education to include only schools run by government employees; rather, we should think broadly about our goals and criteria for public schooling and then be flexible in how we achieve these. Thus school choice, private management organizations, and other arrangements could fulfill our needs; likewise, our current public school system may actually be less "public" than we're willing to admit. His related point is that examining what's "public" about education quickly exposes the silliness of those who oppose reforms as being "anti-public school." The rebuttals also raise interesting questions. For example, how can the standards movement, with its top-down interventions, be consistent with democratic control of schools? How do we balance "the relative claims of the student, family, community, nation, and the wider world on how and what schools teach"? Unfortunately, however, most of the counterarguments miss the mark. From Evans Clinchy's call for "safeguards against the threat of vouchers and further encroachment of the private corporate sector into the field of public schooling," to Joe Nathan's preference for constructivist learning, the rebuttals focus on ancillary issues while only loosely addressing what is "public" about education (and then of course they tend to conclude that the optimal answer is something awfully like the status quo). Perhaps we should view this collective changing of the subject as evidence that Hess is right - logic does dictate a rethinking of "public" education - but we worry that most of the education world would simply prefer to ignore this issue. The articles are available online (subscribers only) at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm, or you can pick up a hard copy and flip to page 433.

Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ileana Gruia
Boston College
January 2004

Walt Haney, George Madaus, and four colleagues at Boston College's testing center authored this 72-page report on behalf of the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy. It analyzes 30 years of grade retention, cohort progression and dropout data for the U.S. as a whole and for the states. After 10,000+ calculations, they reach four conclusions. First, and not surprising, kindergarten participation rates rose from 60 percent to 90 percent over these three decades. Second, a lot of kids (almost 12 percent, they say) are "disappearing" from the education pipeline between grades 9 and 10. Third, there's a 9th grade "bulge": lots more students (12 percent more) enrolled in 9th grade than were enrolled the previous year in 8th, which is explained, say the authors, by high rates of grade retention during the freshman year. Fourth, what we already knew to be a dismayingly low rate of high-school graduation - 75 percent if you compare the number of graduates with the number of 8th graders 4 years earlier - grows even worse, to 67 percent, when the number of graduates is set alongside the number of 9th graders 3.5 years earlier. As you might expect if you are acquainted with Messrs. Haney and Madaus and their lapdog of a "national board," the authors ascribe all these woes to standards-based reform and high-stakes testing. Unfortunately, their remedy is to do away with the tests rather than do a better job of equipping young people to pass them. But see for yourself by surfing to http://www.bc.edu/research/nbetpp/reports.html.

James Peyser and Robert Costrell, Education Next
Spring 2004

Last week, I commented on the weakness of an Ohio analysis that purported to estimate the state's cost of "complying" with the No Child Left Behind act. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=134#1661.) I also steered readers to two other new analyses. Each deserves further comment. The latest (spring 2004) issue of Education Next contains - along with much else of interest - a super essay by James Peyser (who chairs the Massachusetts state board of education) and Robert Costrell (chief economist in that state's Office of Administration and Finance) that refutes the widely held view that NCLB is an "unfunded mandate." Rather, say Peyser and Costrell, the "studies" that estimate absurdly high costs of implementing NCLB arise from the same faulty analytic approach as contemporary school-finance equalization lawsuits. In particular, they rely on a flawed and "outdated notion that education can be reduced to a simple production function between input and output." Any conscientious effort to estimate the cost of boosting student achievement must be approached in a very different way, and efforts to calculate NCLB's costs must be carefully distinguished from the education-reform efforts (and spending increases) that virtually every state and district was already undertaking. Conclude Peyser and Costrell: "[I]t would appear that spending in Massachusetts is adequate to achieve the NCLB student achievement mandate." Nationally, they say, the critics are also wrong. The increases underway in federal education spending either "fully cover the fiscal gap" or "come pretty close - especially when combined with state-level spending increases." You can find the article (along with other preview articles from the spring issue of Ed Next) online at http://www.educationnext.org/20042/index.html.

Meave O'Marah, Kenneth Klau, Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders Council
February 2004

Also newly released is a study by AccountabilityWorks, entitled NCLB Under A Microscope, undertaken jointly with the Education Leaders Council, that says the additional federal funds being channeled into K-12 education "exceed the state and local 'hard costs' resulting from specific NCLB requirements." The authors dispute the contention that it's also Washington's duty to bear the costs of boosting pupil achievement, noting that the states have a "pre-existing obligation to ensure a quality education for all students." You can find it at http://www.educationleaders.org/elc/events/elc_cost_study-04.pdf.

Good news and bad from Georgia, where the state's Professional Standards Commission recently announced that teachers needn't earn an education degree but can be certified if they pass both the state's certification exam and a standardized content knowledge test called the "principles of learning and teaching." While teachers certified through this alternative process will still have to undergo a year of mentoring and on-the-job training, they will not have to jump through any of the traditional ed-school hoops. Of course, for professors whose salary depends on the existence of these hoops, this freedom to teach is a troubling development. Not surprisingly, therefore, the dean of Georgia State's College of Education asserts that the new alternative certification process "will put unqualified teachers in classrooms. We're talking about a very difficult job with no training." Unfortunately, the Commission rejected a proposal to allow candidates without teaching backgrounds to become school principals (a major recommendation of the Fordham-Broad Foundation publication Better Leaders for America's Schools: A Manifesto, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=1).

"Teacher certification process simplified," by Dana Tofig, Atlanta Journal Constitution, February 13, 2004

Two bills now before the Tennessee General Assembly question the reliability and worth of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS), which was implemented 14 years ago in a trailblazing effort to track student progress, measure whether students were making suitable yearly academic gains, and estimate the effectiveness of their teachers. Critics maintain that the complicated assessment system, which was designed by and is still run by William Sanders, is difficult to understand and punishes high-achieving schools by focusing on annual gains instead of absolute scores, and also that TVAAS results "don't jibe with other student test information coming from the state." However, many educators - especially those serving low-income and minority students who typically score lower than their peers on standardized tests - have praised the program. Johnny Crow, principal of East Hickman Middle School in Lyles, Tennessee argues that the system "gives you a way to show some progress. It gives teachers an opportunity to show that they are doing their job." State Education Commissioner Lana Seivers indicated that the state department of education had not yet chosen sides in the debate, but she expects to be asked to provide information over the course of the next few weeks.

"Bills would kill value-added test scores," by Claudette Riley, Tennessean, February 13, 2004

The New York State Council for the Social Studies recently released the agenda for its annual conference, to be held in balmy Rochester in March. Keynoting the event will be Denee Mattioli, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, who has been "invited to comment on the Fordham Foundation report on the teaching of American history." We assume they're speaking of Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? (http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=317), published by Fordham and written by a group of disaffected social studies educators calling themselves the "Contrarians," which takes NCSS to task for championing a tendentious and ideology-driven approach to teaching history. Surprisingly, neither Fordham nor the Contrarians are invited to participate. As a survivor of many a tedious keynote address, Gadfly suspects that the good teachers of the Empire State would much prefer a vigorous give-and-take to another boring lecture. Our offer is this: invite us up and we'll gladly pack our snow boots and journey to Rochester to debate Dr. Mattioli. It's one way NYSCSS could prove that it's serious when claiming to be "a market-place of ideas."

"Historian and NCSS president to keynote," press release, New York State Council for the Social Studies

In The Language Police, Diane Ravitch lifted the veil on the way "bias committees" at major publishing houses sanitize and censor the information presented in student tests and textbooks. One of the more interesting revelations was found in a glossary Ravitch created of words and terms that are routinely deleted from texts and tests in the name of cultural sensitivity, including such items as "landlord, cowboy, brotherhood, yacht, cult, and primitive." Ravitch also invited readers to pass along their own examples of "language policing," which they have now done in spades, revealing still more disturbing examples of what can happen when publishers kowtow to pressure groups. One textbook writer sent in the guidelines used by Harcourt/Steck/Vaughn to remove photographs that might be considered offensive, such as "pictures of women with big hair or sleeveless blouses and men with dreadlocks or medallions." Even worse are the state guidelines for language sensitivity in New York, which maintain that while "we may not always understand why a certain word hurts, we don't have to. It's enough that someone says 'That language doesn't respect me.'" This approach, Ravitch argues, is grounded in a belief that says, "If any word or phrase is likely to give anyone offense, no matter how far-fetched, it should be deleted." Such a broad definition of bias has, of course, led to the sanitization and bowdlerization of history and literature. Even the benign word "penmanship," where the "three offensive letters m-a-n . . . are in the middle of the word," is off limits. If you want to learn just how bad history textbooks have gotten, stay tuned. In a few weeks, Fordham will release its own review of widely used U.S. and world history textbooks led by none other than Dr. Ravitch.

"You can't say that," by Diane Ravitch, Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2004  (subscription required)

"Teachers, not Texas have the best eye for textbooks," by Diane Ravitch, Austin-American Statesman February 18, 2004 (registration required)

A small intellectual brush fire has broken out among American liberals concerning the No Child Left Behind act. This month, The American Prospect featured a passel of articles under the title "Children Left Behind: Educating America." Among the contributions was Peter Schrag's "Bush's Education Fraud," contending that NCLB "could well implode and take down two decades of state educational reforms with it." The article traces the full gamut of NCLB objections, some reasonable - the clumsy choice provisions and vexed treatment of special ed students, for example - and some not so, such as the whining about "unfunded mandates." (For more on that topic, see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=134#1661.) Other articles are standard fare, such as Richard Rothstein's eternal lament that standardized tests can't assess "creativity, insight, reasoning and the application of skills to unrehearsed situations." Writing in the 21st Century Schools Project Bulletin, Andrew Rotherham responds to the TAP authors in a sharp essay called "Impotent Liberalism." Says Rotherham, "it never seems to enter the calculus of today's establishment liberals that perhaps a system that works inadequately for too many poor and minority youngsters (and does so in all types of communities - equity problems are not just the urban tail wagging the public school dog) needs broader reforms." A fascinating and we hope constructive battle of ideas among the left.

"Children left behind," The American Prospect, February 2004,  (not all articles in this section are available online)

"Impotent liberalism," by Andrew Rotherham, 21st Century Schools Project Bulletin, February 10, 2004

Last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chief Joel Klein (two men who've been at the point of Gadfly's rapier wit more than once) declared that they would hold back third-graders who fail the state's standardized exam. But only after the second failure, and only after the students take summer school for six weeks - and an appeals process will be built in to the plan. For this, Klein and Bloomberg were pilloried by the press, teachers' unions, and parents' groups. Diane Ravitch also expressed reservations. But we agree with the Daily News editorialist: What is the alternative? Students who score below proficiency on the state's tests at eight years old are at best heading toward a rocky educational future. Does anyone truly believe that passing them to the next grade without intervention will bring them up to proficiency? And what does it say to students who are proficient and deserve to pass? How would passing their unprepared classmates honor their achievement? No one likes holding back students. But clich??d as it is, the old parental nostrum is true: it really is for their own good.

"Tweak to 3rd-grade plan is appealing," by Celeste Katz, New York Daily News, February 12, 2004

"Parents flunk Mike's no-promotion plan," by Carl Campanile and David Seifman, New York Post, February 11, 2004

"Advocates of failure must be defeated," New York Daily News, editorial, February 17, 2004

A notice in the Federal Register seldom elicits more than a yawn from anyone but a few affected bureaucrats and the special interests organized to hound them. But the Department of Education's regulations for educating and testing disabled students under NCLB deserve much wider attention. They embody a subtle but significant step toward reforming special education and a further indication of the Department's commitment to the improved education of every child. [See http://www.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2003/12/12092003.html.]

The specific question addressed in these new regulations is, "How should states and districts educate and assess the most cognitively disabled students within the federal government's accountability framework?" But answering that question reveals much about one's understanding of the responsibility of schools toward disabled students as well as one's view of content standards, achievement standards, and assessments. Considering the ossified politics of special education and the mounting backlash against NCLB, the implications of any decision made by the Department in this domain would have been significant.

Start by recalling special education's place within NCLB. During the bill's consideration, President Bush and congressional leaders focused public attention on the racial achievement gap, yet the academic achievement of disabled students became an equally important component in the law's final language. In particular, when states and districts disaggregate achievement results, both racial and disability categories must be reported, and the consequences for failing to make progress on either front are identical.

In terms of principle, these requirements plainly demonstrate that the law intends to leave NO child behind. And as education policy, they make more big assertions. First, students with IEPs can also become proficient in the essential skills that schools are designed to impart, like reading and math. Second, schools, districts, and states must fully commit to educating, assessing, and reporting on the academic progress of their disabled pupils.

Thanks to the NCLB-generated data that's now flowing in, we know more about the "disability gap," one of the most underreported stories in education today. On average, disabled students lag farther behind their non-disabled classmates than African American and Hispanic students lag behind their white classmates. For example:

" In Maryland, 66 percent of 8th graders in regular education are proficient or advanced in reading, while only 20 percent of special education students reach the same level.

" In Connecticut, 41 percent of 8th grade special education students are "below basic" in writing, but only 6 percent of regular education students fall in the same category.

" In Wisconsin, 78 percent of 10th graders in regular education are at or above proficient in reading. Only 27 percent of special education students reach these same levels.

" In New Jersey, 77 percent of 11th graders in general education are proficient or advanced in math, but only 26 percent of special education students achieve the same results.

As states began to calculate "Adequate Yearly Progress," they noticed that the disability gap was causing even some of their "best" suburban schools to miss the mark. Unfortunately, rather than redoubling their efforts to deliver a better education to a disadvantaged class of students, many state and local education leaders complained about the NCLB requirements themselves, either disgracefully arguing that the gap was evidence of NCLB's heartlessness or cynically suggesting that lawmakers were naive to have such high expectations for children with disabilities. Many have called for the special education category to be removed from AYP determinations and even for abolishing assessments of special needs students.

As this opposition strengthened, the Department of Education was facing a related and critically important policy question: how to address the concern that a small percentage of special education students - mainly those with the most profound disabilities - in truth cannot reasonably be expected to meet grade-level proficiency standards or be tested in the same way as their peers. How to balance these contending considerations? Would the Department allow states to use lower standards for all students with IEPs? Would it allow states to exempt from testing as many special-needs students as they chose? Would it take steps toward removing special education from AYP calculations altogether?

Thankfully, no. The Department held fast and found a solution that recognizes the realities of special education while remaining faithful to standards, assessments, and universal accountability.

The new rules allow states to use alternative academic standards and assessments when determining the proficiency of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. A cap is set, though, so only one percent of all students (about 10 percent of disabled students) may have their scores on alternate standards be counted toward the state's AYP requirements. In plain English, this means that 99 percent of students in a grade - regardless of race, gender, SES, or disability - must be taught a curriculum aligned with the state's rigorous content standards and assessed accordingly. The most cognitively disabled students - but not more than 1 percent of the students in a grade - may be held to a different academic standard, though they, too, must be taught an appropriate, challenging curriculum and be assessed on their progress in mastering it.

Three important lessons should be taken away from this episode. First, these regulations represent another battle won against the "soft bigotry of low expectations." All children can learn, all children should be challenged, all schools must take seriously their responsibility to educate all of their students.

Second, the disability gap is real, and it is serious. According to the federal government, only 10 percent of disabled students should be held to a standard different than non-disabled students. So why is there a 30 percent, 40 percent, or 50 percent gap in some districts and states between the achievement of disabled and non-disabled students?

Third, and most importantly, IDEA itself has allowed the disability gap to widen. IDEA has been the patrolman monitoring the education of disabled students for nearly 30 years. While it has done a fine job of guaranteeing equal access to public schooling, it has not resulted in equal education for students with disabilities. One may deny that IDEA's provisions have contributed to the disability gap, but it is irrefutable that this gap has continued on IDEA's watch. Isn't it time to remedy that?

In the months to come, as Congress completes work on IDEA's reauthorization, one question should keep members awake at night: "How can the federal government enable states, districts, schools, and teachers to overcome the real education problem faced by disabled youngsters - the disability achievement gap - instead of focusing on rules and procedures?"

Here's one idea: allow a school, district, or state to sign a "charter" with the U.S. Department of Education promising to reduce the disability gap in exchange for flexibility over IDEA rules.

Too controversial, you say? Just put it in the federal register . . . no one will notice.

Andy Smarick is director of the Charter School Leadership Council and a former Congressional aide.

We have only one concern at the news that litigator Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice will shortly leave that group to head the new School Choice Alliance (formed by the merger of the American Education Reform Council, the American Education Reform Foundation, and Children First America) - that the school choice movement may lose his incisive lawyerly mind in future court battles. But it's a mere quibble about a truly inspired choice to lead what we believe will become a significant contender in the choice wars. Congratulations, Clint.

Articles by Frederick M. Hess, Linda Nathan, Joe Nathan, Ray Bacchetti, and Evans Clinchy, Phi Delta Kappan
February 2004

This month Kappan offers six essays examining and debating the notion of "public" schooling. Rick Hess frames the discussion - and offers the most interesting insights - by penning the opening article and a rejoinder. In the middle are four pieces from teachers and scholars offering varying views on Hess's arguments. His central point is that we need not constrain our definition of a "public" education to include only schools run by government employees; rather, we should think broadly about our goals and criteria for public schooling and then be flexible in how we achieve these. Thus school choice, private management organizations, and other arrangements could fulfill our needs; likewise, our current public school system may actually be less "public" than we're willing to admit. His related point is that examining what's "public" about education quickly exposes the silliness of those who oppose reforms as being "anti-public school." The rebuttals also raise interesting questions. For example, how can the standards movement, with its top-down interventions, be consistent with democratic control of schools? How do we balance "the relative claims of the student, family, community, nation, and the wider world on how and what schools teach"? Unfortunately, however, most of the counterarguments miss the mark. From Evans Clinchy's call for "safeguards against the threat of vouchers and further encroachment of the private corporate sector into the field of public schooling," to Joe Nathan's preference for constructivist learning, the rebuttals focus on ancillary issues while only loosely addressing what is "public" about education (and then of course they tend to conclude that the optimal answer is something awfully like the status quo). Perhaps we should view this collective changing of the subject as evidence that Hess is right - logic does dictate a rethinking of "public" education - but we worry that most of the education world would simply prefer to ignore this issue. The articles are available online (subscribers only) at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kappan.htm, or you can pick up a hard copy and flip to page 433.

James Peyser and Robert Costrell, Education Next
Spring 2004

Last week, I commented on the weakness of an Ohio analysis that purported to estimate the state's cost of "complying" with the No Child Left Behind act. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=134#1661.) I also steered readers to two other new analyses. Each deserves further comment. The latest (spring 2004) issue of Education Next contains - along with much else of interest - a super essay by James Peyser (who chairs the Massachusetts state board of education) and Robert Costrell (chief economist in that state's Office of Administration and Finance) that refutes the widely held view that NCLB is an "unfunded mandate." Rather, say Peyser and Costrell, the "studies" that estimate absurdly high costs of implementing NCLB arise from the same faulty analytic approach as contemporary school-finance equalization lawsuits. In particular, they rely on a flawed and "outdated notion that education can be reduced to a simple production function between input and output." Any conscientious effort to estimate the cost of boosting student achievement must be approached in a very different way, and efforts to calculate NCLB's costs must be carefully distinguished from the education-reform efforts (and spending increases) that virtually every state and district was already undertaking. Conclude Peyser and Costrell: "[I]t would appear that spending in Massachusetts is adequate to achieve the NCLB student achievement mandate." Nationally, they say, the critics are also wrong. The increases underway in federal education spending either "fully cover the fiscal gap" or "come pretty close - especially when combined with state-level spending increases." You can find the article (along with other preview articles from the spring issue of Ed Next) online at http://www.educationnext.org/20042/index.html.

Meave O'Marah, Kenneth Klau, Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders Council
February 2004

Also newly released is a study by AccountabilityWorks, entitled NCLB Under A Microscope, undertaken jointly with the Education Leaders Council, that says the additional federal funds being channeled into K-12 education "exceed the state and local 'hard costs' resulting from specific NCLB requirements." The authors dispute the contention that it's also Washington's duty to bear the costs of boosting pupil achievement, noting that the states have a "pre-existing obligation to ensure a quality education for all students." You can find it at http://www.educationleaders.org/elc/events/elc_cost_study-04.pdf.

Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ileana Gruia
Boston College
January 2004

Walt Haney, George Madaus, and four colleagues at Boston College's testing center authored this 72-page report on behalf of the National Board on Educational Testing and Public Policy. It analyzes 30 years of grade retention, cohort progression and dropout data for the U.S. as a whole and for the states. After 10,000+ calculations, they reach four conclusions. First, and not surprising, kindergarten participation rates rose from 60 percent to 90 percent over these three decades. Second, a lot of kids (almost 12 percent, they say) are "disappearing" from the education pipeline between grades 9 and 10. Third, there's a 9th grade "bulge": lots more students (12 percent more) enrolled in 9th grade than were enrolled the previous year in 8th, which is explained, say the authors, by high rates of grade retention during the freshman year. Fourth, what we already knew to be a dismayingly low rate of high-school graduation - 75 percent if you compare the number of graduates with the number of 8th graders 4 years earlier - grows even worse, to 67 percent, when the number of graduates is set alongside the number of 9th graders 3.5 years earlier. As you might expect if you are acquainted with Messrs. Haney and Madaus and their lapdog of a "national board," the authors ascribe all these woes to standards-based reform and high-stakes testing. Unfortunately, their remedy is to do away with the tests rather than do a better job of equipping young people to pass them. But see for yourself by surfing to http://www.bc.edu/research/nbetpp/reports.html.