The Education Gadfly Weekly

National Center for Education Statistics
March 2005

This 140-page report from NCES tells you everything you could conceivably want to know about U.S. high-school sophomores in 2001-2, the first stage of a new multi-year longitudinal study. The data are extremely important, especially considering the nation's current obsession with high-school reform, though one wishes the government could produce them in less than three years. (The students profiled here are the class that graduated last June and are now 9-10 months beyond high school.) There is LOTS of information here, including demographics, data on school (and extracurricular) experiences, students' use of time, their "values, expectations and plans," and quite a lot about their reading and math prowess based on a specially tailored test. That test gauged reading proficiency at three different levels and math skills at five levels. The news is not good. While most tenth graders possess very basic skills, the percentage who can read at the level of "simple inference" is less than half and the fraction that can handle "intermediate level" math concepts (and formulate "multi-step solutions to word problems") is just one in five. Yet when asked about their educational aspirations, 72 percent expect to graduate from a four-year college and half expect to earn a graduate degree. Talk about a major mismatch between hope and reality. You can root around in these data to your heart's content, and I predict you will find your sense of alarm steadily rising as you do. Find it online here.

Susan H. Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson, editors, Oxford University Press
April 2005

This volume, in Annenberg's "Institutions of Democracy" series, compiles 14 chapters from different writers on the role of schools in a democratic society. Once you know that the bulk of the authors come from ed schools, you get a good idea of what will be said, and the authors generally do not disappoint. Thus we learn that "what the Greeks defined as classical liberal training for broad civic engagement has been largely displaced by regimented instruction in many nations, simply to fit graduates into neoclassical tenets that advance markets and material consumption," that the curriculum frameworks of E.D. Hirsch are "unwieldy and random," and of course that "voucher programs challenge the very publicness of education." Even worse, there is only brief discussion of the quality of civic and historical education today; instead, of course, the dominant barriers to developing good citizens are that schools might not do enough to teach students how to "deliberate," and that the "subordinate status" of teachers means they "cannot be good models for their students and teach in ways that encourage independent thought and action" (for students learn about democracy in part "through the conduct of their classes and school") - as if it were obvious that all organizations are best run as mini-democracies. One author dares support choice (among public schools, anyway), but mostly to combat the persistent "customs of racial steering in home-buying and apartment rentals" that keep minorities out of good school districts. Ultimately, the book offers a window into the views of ed school professors, which would be more interesting if each chapter weren't a little longer than necessary and a little too dry. Not that the book has nothing to offer. A chapter chronicling the history of state and federal roles in offering public schooling is of use and the short case-studies of schooling's role in Turkish and South African societies are interesting. It's soon to be available via www.oup.com. 

Kevin Donnelly, Menzies Research Centre
2004

From Down Under comes this blistering critique of the Australian education system. Australians are exiting public schools in record numbers. In 2002, 30 percent of Aussie kids were in private schools, compared to 22 percent in 1980. Donnelly highlights a litany of problems contributing to failing public schools - problems similar, yet often more egregious than the ones we have in America. He argues that Australia's education system is currently "dumbed down, politically correct, and under-performing." Australia's standards are not as rigorous as other high-performing countries, span multiple years, and lack rigorous assessment until the final year of school. Moreover, the curriculum has been hijacked by unions and their bureaucratic allies, who have a fetish for politically correct instructional materials but seemingly little interest in that material's effectiveness. (Last year, for example, a six-year-old boy from Queensland was suspended for sexual harassment when he "poked a girl on the bum" and was made to review a picture of a naked woman and point to the area he touched.) Finally, Australia has adopted an outcomes-based approach to learning, which eschews a syllabus or standards and instead has teachers judge students' success through vague guidelines. This handholding has lead to innovations like "fuzzy math" (primary students use calculators and no longer perform simple equations like long division) and "whole learning" (students look and guess to determine the meaning of words). Like many right-wing critics of political correctness, Donnelly sometimes falls prey to a kind of sensitivity that verges on paranoia. But the book does excel in identifying the system's problems and proposing clear solutions. Order it here.

George K. Cunningham and J. E. Stone, JAM Press
March 2005

This essay from a forthcoming book (Value Added Models in Education: Theory and Applications, edited by Robert Lissitz) concludes that "the achievement gains associated with NBPTS certification are small and thus give rise to the question of whether its costs are worth its benefits." As a lower-cost alternative, the authors recommend value-added analysis of student test data by teacher. In particular, they suggest monetary awards or bonuses to teachers whose pupils "meet or exceed the 90th percentile of local district gains." What this mostly is, however, is an analysis of four extant studies (all small) of NBPTS certification, one of them by co-author Stone. You can find it here.

Over the past half-century, the number of pupils in U.S. schools grew by about 50 percent while the number of teachers nearly tripled. Spending per student rose threefold, too. If the teaching force had simply kept pace with enrollments, school budgets had risen as they did, and nothing else changed, today's average teacher would earn nearly $100,000, plus generous benefits. We'd have a radically different view of the job and it would attract different sorts of people.

Yes, classes would be larger - about what they were when I was in school. True, there'd be fewer specialists and supervisors. And we wouldn't have as many instructors for youngsters with "special needs." But teachers would earn twice what they do today (less than $50,000, on average) and talented college graduates would vie for the relatively few openings in those ranks.

What America has done, these past 50 years, is invest in more teachers rather than better ones, even as countless appealing and lucrative options have opened up for the able women who once poured into public schooling. No wonder teaching salaries have just kept pace with inflation, despite huge increases in education budgets. No wonder the teaching occupation, with blessed exceptions, draws people from the lower ranks of our lesser universities. No wonder there are shortages in key branches of this sprawling profession. When you employ three million people and you don't pay very well, it's hard to keep a field fully staffed, especially in locales (rural communities, tough urban schools) that aren't too enticing and in subjects such as math and science where well-qualified individuals can earn big bucks doing something else.

Why did we triple the size of the teaching work force instead of paying more to a smaller number of stronger people? Three reasons.

First, the seductiveness of smaller classes. Teachers want fewer kids in their classrooms and parents think their children will be better off, despite scant evidence that students learn more in smaller classes, particularly from less able instructors. Second, the institutional interests that benefit from a larger teaching force, above all dues-collecting (and influence-seeking) unions, and colleges of education whose revenues (tuition, state subsidies) and size (all those faculty slots) depend on their enrollments. Third, the social forces pushing schools to treat children differently from one another, creating one set of classes for the gifted, others for children with handicaps, those who want to learn Japanese, who seek full-day kindergarten or who crave more community-service opportunities.

Nobody has resisted. It was not in anyone's interest to keep the teaching ranks sparse, while many interests were served by helping them to swell. Today, we pay the price: lots of money spent on schooling, nearly all of it for salaries, but schooling that, at the end of the day, depends on the knowledge, skills and commitment of teachers who don't earn much and cannot see that they ever will.

Compounding that problem, we make multiple policy blunders. We restrict entry to people "certified" by state bureaucracies, normally after passing through quasi-monopolistic training programs that add little value. Thus an ill-paid vocation also has daunting, yet pointless, barriers to entry. We pay mediocre instructors the same as super-teachers. Though tiny cracks are appearing in the "uniform salary schedule," in general an energized and highly effective classroom practitioner earns no more than a feckless time-server. We pay no more to high-school physics or math teachers than middle-school gym teachers, though the latter are easy to find while people capable of the former posts are scarce and have plentiful options. We pay no more to those who take on daunting assignments in tough schools than to those who work with easy kids in leafy suburbs. In fact, we often pay them less.

Instead of recognizing that today's 20-somethings commonly try multiple occupations before settling down (if they ever do), then making imaginative use of those who are game to teach for a few years, we still assume that teaching is a lifelong vocation and lament anyone who exits the classroom for other pursuits. Instead of deploying technology so that gifted teachers reach hundreds of kids while others function more like tutors or aides, we assume that every classroom needs its own Socrates.

Despite all that, and to their great credit, most teachers are decent folks who care about kids and want to help them learn. But turning around U.S. schools and "leaving no child behind" calls for more. It also requires passion, brains, knowledge and technique. Federal law now demands subject-matter mastery. Such qualities are hard to find in vast numbers, however, especially when the job doesn't pay very well. Yet fat across-the-board raises for three million people are a pipe dream. (Adding $10,000 plus benefits to their pay would add some $40 billion to school budgets.)

Maybe we can't turn back the clock on the numbers, but surely we can reverse the policy errors. With hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs now turning over each year, at minimum we should insist that new entrants play by different rules that reward effectiveness, deploy smart incentives and suitable technology, compensate them sensibly, and make skillful use of short-termers instead of just wishing they'd stay longer. And this time let's watch what we're doing.

This article originally appeared in the March 11, 2005 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The March 22, 2005 edition published several letters in response, available here (subscription required).

Recent discussions about inadequate high schools have focused on improving math and English. But topics like geography remain in desperate need of attention as well. Several years ago, a poll reported that only 13 percent of Americans ages 18-24 could find Iraq on a map, and scores on the 2001 geography NAEP were dismayingly low for high school students. One college professor in this week's Washington Times reports that a mere 20 percent of her students could find Thailand on a map following the devastating tsunami. Parents, educators, and geography-oriented organizations are making some progress at giving the subject greater priority in schools across America. In 2004, 10,471 students took the AP Geography course, compared to only 3,000 in 2001. The Geographic Education National Implementation Project (GENIP), which offers a voluntary geography standards framework for states, reports that forty-nine states (all but Iowa) have adopted standards based on GENIP's guidelines. According to Sarah Bednarz, a professor of geography at Texas A&M (and coordinator of GENIP), students should know more than simply the obvious names, spellings, and locations on a map but should also know context and connections between people and places. Not doing so, she says, "would be like saying mathematics is all arithmetic."

"Lost in geography," Ann Geracimos, Washington Times, March 21, 2005

The Department of Health and Human Services is under fire for not doing enough to ferret out financial mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in Head Start programs. A GAO report found that three-quarters of the Head Start programs the agency reviewed in 2000 showed financial and administrative irregularities, many with multiple infractions, and about half of the programs had irregularities for three or more years - even after being notified that they needed to get their act in order. Republicans have seized upon the report to revive the effort to restructure Head Start into a state-run block grant program; Head Start supporters say most of the violations are minor, "parking ticket" offenses and the whole thing is a precursor to a campaign to close the program. Lost in the debate is serious consideration of precisely what kind of pre-schooling at-risk kids most need. We know for a fact that Head Start isn't providing it. (See here for more.) As Congress considers overhauling Head Start's administrative and financial management protocols, we hope that someone will spare a thought to overhauling the curriculum. 

"Government is criticized on oversight of Head Start," by Greg Winter, New York Times, March 18, 2005 (subscription required)

"Report finds weak federal oversight of Head Start program," by Ben Feller, Associated Press, March 18, 2005 (subscription required)

If only every school had this problem. School officials at the affluent New Trier High School in northern Chicago, a high-performing public school that sends 95 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, are discussing plans that they hope will decrease student intensity. Officials say extreme parental pressure to win admission to elite colleges causes students to overburden themselves by taking the toughest classes and packing multiple extracurricular activities into their days. At New Trier, almost 150 students skip lunch, while many others arrive to school early (around 7:00 a.m.) to take more classes - up to an astonishing nine classes per day. Officials want to make lunch mandatory and require students who show up early to take a free period later in the day. But this has drawn criticism from students like Melissa Birkhold, who skips lunch for chamber orchestra (her third music class) and hopes to be a musician some day: "They're trying to cut out some of the arts classes, and they don't understand that that's what makes life fun...I don't think they should tell me I have to take both lunch and a free period." Certainly, some perspective is required. But school officials should be careful about regulations that curtail ambition and useful activity (think of France's mandatory 35-hour work week, designed to impose leisure, which has crippled the French economy). Should "Do Less" really be the message school leaders send to students?

"Hard-charging high schools urge students to do less," by Amanda Paulson, Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2005

"Lunch - or Harvard?," by Jodi S. Cohen, Chicago Tribune, March 3, 2005

It's a no-rules steel cage match to the death in California, pitting the California Teachers Association against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Union members are expected to approve a proposal to increase member dues by $180 over three years, a levy that will add a staggering $54 million to the $11 million war chest the union has assembled to fight the Governor's education proposals. CTA plans to postpone every project that is not "absolutely necessary" and is warning teachers that Schwarzenegger's plans put careers and retirements in jeopardy. The union opposes his support for teacher merit pay, even in light of strong public approval. It opposes his legislation to reform the calcified tenure system. And it opposes what it calls massive cuts in education, even though education spending is actually increasing. But don't expect the Governator to roll over. He is fighting back with a series of new ads touting his reforms. Should be an exciting summer.

"Governor rolls out TV ads that tout reforms for education," by David M. Drucker, Inside Bay Area, March 18, 2005

"Putting students first," by Margaret Fortune, Voice of San Diego, March 10, 2005

"Teachers union wants dues raised," by Alexa H. Bluth, Sacramento Bee, March 19, 2005

"Rewards, not tenure," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2005 (subscription required)

A Bronx teacher at notoriously bad Middle School 142 was charged this week with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes following the discovery that he paid a former homeless man two dollars to take his state certification exam. The teacher, Wayne Brightly, was "tired of flunking" and was scared of losing his $59,000 salary if he failed again. Brightly is a 38-year-old tall black man; Rubin Leitner, his exam "fill-in," is a 58-year-old overweight white man with Asperger's Syndrome. "No one would ever know," Brightly promised. And apparently on exam day, no one was the wiser. It wasn't until Leitner passed the exam, scoring much, much higher than Brightly ever had in the past, that state officials realized something was awry. Read the full story: it's too good to miss.

"Schoolhouse crock," by Lisa Munoz, Jonathan Lemire, and Joe Williams, New York Daily News, March 23, 2005

"Klein furious over 'dunce' teacher," by Kathleen Lucadamo and Joe Williams, New York Daily News, March 24, 2005

Roger Shattuck, a distinguished literary and cultural critic from Boston University, has a fascinating story in the New York Review of Books about serving on a local school board in Vermont. To his chagrin, Shattuck discovers that the Green Mountain State's Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities amount to little more than vague exhortations, prescribing no particular course of study or specific subjects to be mastered. (We've made the same observation; see our recent evaluations of state math and English standards.) Shattuck uses this episode to embark on an examination of John Dewey's famous formulation of the synthesis between "child-centered" and curriculum-centered education. It's a sensitive and disarmingly dispassionate examination of a topic that manages even today to roil emotions, and Shattuck's essay is hard to summarize. We take slight exception to two points. First, Shattuck assumes that Dewey's synthesis of what we now call "constructivism" and "standards-based education" is without inherent tensions and contradictions. That's a bit too neat; in fact, today's curricular and pedagogical battles spring in part from inherent tensions and even contradictions in Dewey's thought. Second, Shattuck makes the mistake of assuming that all standards must be vague and hortatory by their nature, and therefore advocates dropping state standards in favor of adopting curricula that prescribe specific topics, works, and notions. He's wrong; good standards do exist, and the best curricula respond to high-quality expectations from states. In the end, there must be some forum for taxpayers and state leaders to explain, in detail and with specificity, what children should know and be able to do, to use a bit of the edu-jargon that Shattuck decries. Good standards are precisely that forum.

"The shame of the schools," by Roger Shattuck, New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005 (subscription required; article purchase costs $3)

George K. Cunningham and J. E. Stone, JAM Press
March 2005

This essay from a forthcoming book (Value Added Models in Education: Theory and Applications, edited by Robert Lissitz) concludes that "the achievement gains associated with NBPTS certification are small and thus give rise to the question of whether its costs are worth its benefits." As a lower-cost alternative, the authors recommend value-added analysis of student test data by teacher. In particular, they suggest monetary awards or bonuses to teachers whose pupils "meet or exceed the 90th percentile of local district gains." What this mostly is, however, is an analysis of four extant studies (all small) of NBPTS certification, one of them by co-author Stone. You can find it here.

Kevin Donnelly, Menzies Research Centre
2004

From Down Under comes this blistering critique of the Australian education system. Australians are exiting public schools in record numbers. In 2002, 30 percent of Aussie kids were in private schools, compared to 22 percent in 1980. Donnelly highlights a litany of problems contributing to failing public schools - problems similar, yet often more egregious than the ones we have in America. He argues that Australia's education system is currently "dumbed down, politically correct, and under-performing." Australia's standards are not as rigorous as other high-performing countries, span multiple years, and lack rigorous assessment until the final year of school. Moreover, the curriculum has been hijacked by unions and their bureaucratic allies, who have a fetish for politically correct instructional materials but seemingly little interest in that material's effectiveness. (Last year, for example, a six-year-old boy from Queensland was suspended for sexual harassment when he "poked a girl on the bum" and was made to review a picture of a naked woman and point to the area he touched.) Finally, Australia has adopted an outcomes-based approach to learning, which eschews a syllabus or standards and instead has teachers judge students' success through vague guidelines. This handholding has lead to innovations like "fuzzy math" (primary students use calculators and no longer perform simple equations like long division) and "whole learning" (students look and guess to determine the meaning of words). Like many right-wing critics of political correctness, Donnelly sometimes falls prey to a kind of sensitivity that verges on paranoia. But the book does excel in identifying the system's problems and proposing clear solutions. Order it here.

National Center for Education Statistics
March 2005

This 140-page report from NCES tells you everything you could conceivably want to know about U.S. high-school sophomores in 2001-2, the first stage of a new multi-year longitudinal study. The data are extremely important, especially considering the nation's current obsession with high-school reform, though one wishes the government could produce them in less than three years. (The students profiled here are the class that graduated last June and are now 9-10 months beyond high school.) There is LOTS of information here, including demographics, data on school (and extracurricular) experiences, students' use of time, their "values, expectations and plans," and quite a lot about their reading and math prowess based on a specially tailored test. That test gauged reading proficiency at three different levels and math skills at five levels. The news is not good. While most tenth graders possess very basic skills, the percentage who can read at the level of "simple inference" is less than half and the fraction that can handle "intermediate level" math concepts (and formulate "multi-step solutions to word problems") is just one in five. Yet when asked about their educational aspirations, 72 percent expect to graduate from a four-year college and half expect to earn a graduate degree. Talk about a major mismatch between hope and reality. You can root around in these data to your heart's content, and I predict you will find your sense of alarm steadily rising as you do. Find it online here.

Susan H. Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson, editors, Oxford University Press
April 2005

This volume, in Annenberg's "Institutions of Democracy" series, compiles 14 chapters from different writers on the role of schools in a democratic society. Once you know that the bulk of the authors come from ed schools, you get a good idea of what will be said, and the authors generally do not disappoint. Thus we learn that "what the Greeks defined as classical liberal training for broad civic engagement has been largely displaced by regimented instruction in many nations, simply to fit graduates into neoclassical tenets that advance markets and material consumption," that the curriculum frameworks of E.D. Hirsch are "unwieldy and random," and of course that "voucher programs challenge the very publicness of education." Even worse, there is only brief discussion of the quality of civic and historical education today; instead, of course, the dominant barriers to developing good citizens are that schools might not do enough to teach students how to "deliberate," and that the "subordinate status" of teachers means they "cannot be good models for their students and teach in ways that encourage independent thought and action" (for students learn about democracy in part "through the conduct of their classes and school") - as if it were obvious that all organizations are best run as mini-democracies. One author dares support choice (among public schools, anyway), but mostly to combat the persistent "customs of racial steering in home-buying and apartment rentals" that keep minorities out of good school districts. Ultimately, the book offers a window into the views of ed school professors, which would be more interesting if each chapter weren't a little longer than necessary and a little too dry. Not that the book has nothing to offer. A chapter chronicling the history of state and federal roles in offering public schooling is of use and the short case-studies of schooling's role in Turkish and South African societies are interesting. It's soon to be available via www.oup.com.