The Education Gadfly Weekly

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Simon and Schuster
October 2003

This important new book by the Thernstroms, who also wrote America in Black and White, will be widely noted and much discussed in education circles in the months ahead. The authors judge the achievement gap to be not only "an American tragedy and national emergency," but also "the central civil rights issue of our time." According to NAEP data, there now exists a four-year gap between whites/Asians and blacks/Hispanics. It is already visible when children first enter school and widens as they progress through K-12 education. It is apparent even in more affluent communities, such as Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland, where black academic achievement is good - but still lags behind. These gaps depress the future earnings potential of minority students, limit their ability to matriculate to college and succeed there, contribute to high rates of social dysfunction and help to create a persistent underclass.

A number of factors are at work, including the lingering effects of racism, poor childhood nutrition and prenatal care, single parenthood, crime, etc. Ill-conceived and ineffective government programs, some of them designed to shrink the gap, are also to blame. But the primary factor holding back black and Hispanic academic achievement - and here we approach the controversial heart of this book - is what can be broadly called culture.

For the Thernstroms, culture is a set of "values, attitudes, and skills that are shaped and reshaped by environment." It encompasses a wide range of attributes, including family expectation and general attitudes toward schooling. There is rich data, both quantitative and qualitative, that lays out some of the cultural patterns that militate against minority academic success. The Thernstroms cover that data and add some observations of their own. For example, the effect of youth culture and especially television has enormous implications for academic achievement in many black families. Black children watch an average of five hours of television per school day, almost as much time as they spend in classes. When weekend viewing is added, TV time far exceeds school time. Only one-fifth of white or Asian children view that much television (with Hispanics more like whites in this respect).

Black children are also more apt to report low levels of respect for educators and to be labeled "disruptive" in class. Other measures, such as the number of books in a home, or the quantity of verbal interaction per day between adults and pre-school children, put them at further disadvantage. Low birth weight, poor nutrition, and other social factors contribute. These factors tend to feed on themselves: once they are seen as underperforming in school, minority youngsters are shunted into less demanding classes and are more likely to drop out entirely - exacerbating the achievement gap.

The good news is that none of these factors is immune to fixes. In fact, studies show that once certain factors are removed, the achievement gap shrinks. Cultural traits that contribute to academic success can be transferred. The book's profiles of KIPP and other successful schools - schools that, week in and week out, demonstrate that these gaps can be narrowed - are worth the purchase price. So is the chapter on "roadblocks to change." But there's much more between these covers. The ISBN is 0743204468 and for more information, go to http://www.simonsays.com/index.html and search for "No Excuses."

Elizabeth McPike et al., Albert Shanker Institute
September 2003

The Albert Shanker Institute is the source of this astute and forceful manifesto on how and why to prepare young Americans (and others) to be effective, committed citizens of a democracy. It updates the 1987 "Education for Democracy: A Statement of Principles," which was jointly developed by the American Federation of Teachers, Freedom House, and our own organizational ancestor, the Educational Excellence Network. Lots of prominent folks have signed the new manifesto, which effectively decimates moral relativism and feel-good history and calls for a strong, democracy-centered curriculum in history, civics, and other key fields. Educators, we hope, will have difficulty ignoring it. And we welcome the kinship between this eloquent statement - characteristic of the Shanker Institute's work in this field and the AFT's long record of good sense in matters curricular - and our own recent efforts to reclaim the social studies. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/template/page.cfm?id=252.) You can find the report at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/Downloads/EfD-draft.pdf.

John R. Logan, Deirdre Oakley and Jacob Stowell, Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Harvard University
September 1, 2003

This short, uninspired, and wholly predictable paper presents a variety of data on the demographics of Boston and its surrounding suburbs, all of which show that Boston is segregated: blacks live in the city and whites live in the suburbs. As a result, Boston-area public schools are segregated and (the paper presumes) are much worse in the city than in the suburbs. Of course, Boston mirrors many other metropolitan areas in this respect, though its segregation is sharper than most. This is a familiar problem and one with no easy solutions (as the tragic history of Boston busing and backlash readily attests). However, the complexity of the issue is no excuse for this paper's embarrassingly weak "conclusions and policy implications," which simply restate the problem and suggest that "the only way that desegregation plans could substantially reduce the separate and unequal character of public education is if they were applied region-wide." This has long been the single note sung by the Harvard Civil Rights Project but it starts and ends with the false premise that state-controlled desegregation plans are the solution. A better idea is to make district boundaries permeable and allow families to choose among all public schools. Minnesota tried this and found that, in the worst districts, housing prices rose (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=14#298); in other words, choice helps decrease the economic disparities that contribute to segregation in the first place. More importantly, it would give minority students the same option to "escape the City of Boston" that this paper says whites have already exercised. To read for yourself, see http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressreleases.php/record_id=37/.

Lance D. Fusarelli, Palgrave Macmillan Inc. 2003

The author is a young professor of education policy at Fordham University (no connection). Though this short, heavily footnoted book reads like a doctoral dissertation, it's a useful review of the politics of school choice (both vouchers and charters), viewed through multiple lenses and with no particularly axe to grind. His conclusion: "If we are witnessing a revolution, it is a slow-moving, uneven revolution whose outcome is very much in doubt." The ISBN is 140396047X. If interested, you can learn more by surfing to http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalogue/index.asp?isbn=0312237537.

A state's academic standards are the recipes from which its education system cooks. A gifted chef may produce tasty dishes without great cookbooks, but most people's food isn't apt to be much better than its recipes. In K-12 education, state standards drive the curriculum, the assessment and accountability systems, the selection of textbooks, training and certification of teachers, and much more. That's why we at Fordham have kept harping on them over the years, periodically evaluating them and then, as states revise them, re-appraising them.

This week we released our first - to our knowledge, America's first - evaluation of state standards for U.S. history. In the post-9/11 world, it's more important than ever for young Americans to learn their nation's past, the principles on which it was founded, the workings of its government, the origins of our freedoms, and how we've responded to past threats from abroad.

Standards alone cannot assure that this will happen. A state may have superb standards yet its children end up learning little. Conversely, a child blessed with a gifted and knowledgeable teacher, or fortunate enough to be enrolled in a terrific school, may end up knowing lots of U.S. history even though his state has dreadful standards. Such is the complexity and variability of American education.

Yet standards may well matter more in U.S. history than other subjects. Because this field is so often submerged within "social studies," and because social studies in most places is deeply present-oriented and a-historical, if not anti-historical, the state has a singular obligation to serve as counter-force, spelling out what it expects its schools to teach and its children to learn about their country's past. 

To conduct this appraisal, we turned to an eminent American historian, Sheldon M. Stern, recently retired historian at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. He set three broad criteria:

First, do a state's K-12 standards expect U.S. history to be taught comprehensively, including the most important political, social, cultural and economic events and major historical figures? Do they set priorities for what students need to know and spell them out so that curriculum directors, textbook authors, test developers, parents, and teachers can organize their own work on the basis of these standards?

Second, do the standards present U.S. history in a coherent and structured sequence that begins with a solid introduction in the early grades and is cumulatively reinforced through high school?

Third, are they evenhanded - reasonably free of hero-worship and glorification of the past at one extreme, and of politically correct posturing, distortions and omissions at the opposite extreme? Do they place historical events in context, avoiding presentism and moralistic judgments?

After recruiting some expert help, Stern reviewed the history or social studies standards of 48 states (Iowa and Rhode Island had none) plus the District of Columbia, to determine how well they handle U.S. history.

He found some good and a lot of bad.

The good news is that six states have done an outstanding job and earned "A" grades. They are Indiana, New York, Alabama, Arizona, California, and Massachusetts. Five more states (DE, GA, KS, OK, VA) earned Bs.

The bad news: a whopping 23 states got Fs, eight received Ds, and seven Cs.

Bottom line: U.S. history standards can be done well, even superbly, but most places aren't doing this. Despite the controversy that typically surrounds the writing of standards in contentious fields such as history, it's possible for states to emerge with first-rate recipes for their education systems to take into the curricular kitchen. Yet three-quarters of them have bungled the assignment.

This is at least part of the explanation for the many assessments that show young Americans knowing less about history than any other subject. For example, the fraction of students (in grades 4, 8 and 12 alike) who reach NAEP's "proficient" level is smaller in history than in any other field. The situation has not improved in the sixteen years since Diane Ravitch and I wrote What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know?

Though U.S. schools include some superb history instructors who are as effective in the classroom as they are passionate about their subject, far too many teachers of history are people who never seriously studied this field themselves. (They may have been certified as "social studies" teachers after majoring in sociology, psychology, or social studies pedagogy.) That's another reason standards matter. The less skilled the cook, the more crucial the recipe.

Fortunately, states can solve the problem of weak standards by revising them. Since Stern's evaluation, for example, Minnesota has already issued new (draft) social studies standards that appear to be light years ahead of the wretched version he reviewed. (And of course they've come under fire for being too "pro-American." Check out the links below.) We've also discovered that Virginia supplements its state standards with a fine curriculum framework that supplies teachers with detailed information about what students should know in U.S history.
 
The new Fordham report, Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card, can be found online at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=320. You may also obtain a hard copy by calling 1-888-TBF-7474 or emailing [email protected].

We're proud to note that this report was unveiled yesterday at a path-breaking Senate hearing on "intellectual diversity" in U.S. education. Witnesses included Diane Ravitch, whose latest book, The Language Police, does so much to reveal the shortcomings of textbooks and tests in fields such as history, and Sandra Stotsky, recently retired from a key post at the Massachusetts Department of Education, where she did huge good in developing the Bay State's generally exemplary academic standards.

Senators Judd Gregg and Lamar Alexander say that yesterday's hearing is only the beginning. We wish them well in this worthy cause.

"State tops nation in teaching U.S. history," by Kim Hooper, Indianapolis Star, September 23, 2003

"Across the nation, educators battle over best way to teach social studies," by Scott Stephens, Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 23, 2003

"U.S. students need better civics education, experts say," by Peter Brownfeld, Fox News, September 16, 2003

"Proposed school standards draw fire," by John Welsh, St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 23, 2003

There's nothing like a little old-fashioned blackmail. . . . The Wall Street Journal reports that education unions are increasingly turning to powerful allies in their fight against education privatization and outsourcing: public employee retirement funds and their billions of investment dollars. In one case, the Journal says, protests from government employee and teachers unions prompted the $145 billion Calpers system (the retirement fund for California public employees) to pressure a major backer of Chris Whittle's Edison Schools to stop investing in firms that take over troubled public schools. Calpers officials, after a pitch from state unions, told investor Jeffrey Leeds that they would not invest in a $500 million fund that his firm, Leeds Weld & Co., is launching, unless he promised to cease and desist from investing in firms like Edison. Leeds agreed. But the retirement funds aren't done with Whittle yet: now they're vowing to block the pending sale of Edison to Liberty Partners, Inc., which manages the $94 billion Florida state retirement system. It's amusing to watch unions act like persnickety capitalists, but of course what this is really about is hardball politics by another name.

"Calpers flexes muscle against privatizing jobs," by Charles Forelle and Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal, September 23, 2003  (subscription required)

A fascinating Education Week profile features Mike Antonucci, author of the Education Intelligence Agency's invaluable weekly Communique on doings within the teacher unions (http://members.aol.com/educationintel/communique.htm). Antonucci has become the Matt Drudge of the education world the old-fashioned way, by getting scoops no one else has. (He was way ahead of the pack, for example, on the biggest union story in years, the embezzlement scandal at the Miami-Dade AFT affiliate). Some of the union members asked to comment on Antonucci's enterprise are predictably disdainful - but the rest of the education world relies on it for timely and (usually) accurate information about organizations that make up in self-interest what they lack in transparency.

"SNOOP!" by Bess Keller, Education Week, September 24, 2003

In May, Gadfly reported that the Los Angeles teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, had managed to unseat several reform-minded members to win back the majority of the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=24#103]. As we anticipated, this reversal of fortune has been bad news for education reformers, in particular for local charter school operators. The current board, with its union-backed majority, has expressed "misgivings about the long-term impacts of the charter movement on the nation's second largest school district" and has yet to approve a single additional charter application, though at least 17 are in its pipeline. Worse, the system keeps skimming off the charters' budgets to help make up for its own fiscal shortfall. Remarks board member Jon Lauritzen, "When the state was wealthy, you could afford to cut a charter loose and let them do their thing. Now when everybody is cutting their budget, it's hard to tell charters they have full right." In fact, charters generally get less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, have far lower administrative and operating costs, and in LA actually give back to the district 37 percent of their special education budget to cover things like student transportation. Case in point: LAUSD asked the Granada Hills charter school to contract for information technology support with the district at a price tag north of $100,000. Granada Hills, however, was able to find a private group to provide the same services for $33,000. Why charter schools should be forced to subsidize the costs of bureaucracy at district schools is beyond Gadfly - but not, apparently, too much for the distinguished members of the LA school board.

"Charter efforts stalled," by Helen Gao, Los Angeles Daily News, September 21, 2003

The Long Beach (CA) Unified School District has received this year's $500,000 Broad Prize for Urban Education, the nation's largest education prize. This prize recognizes urban school systems that have made the greatest strides in shrinking the achievement gaps among ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Long Beach officials estimate that the award money will support college scholarships for 50 graduating seniors. At the announcement, philanthropist Eli Broad also announced a $4 million grant for New York City's Leadership Academy to recruit and train principals from non-traditional backgrounds. Broad, recently profiled in Forbes for his far-flung and imaginative education reform efforts, issued a challenge to New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein to become a finalist for the prize in coming years - and handed him an oversized $500,000 check dated September 200?. The Broad Prize, now in its second year, was first awarded to the Houston Independent School District, which has since come under fire for unreliable dropout data but which is effectively defended by prize panelists and other experts in a recent Education Week  article.

"L.B.'s a real winner!" by Jason Gewirtz, Long Beach Press Telegram, September 23, 2003

"Schools get $4 million to recruit principals," by Elissa Gootman, New York Times, September 23, 2003

"Educating Eli," by Neil Weinberg, Forbes, October 6, 2003

"Despite disputed data, Houston backers say district merited prize," by Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, September 24, 2003

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Simon and Schuster
October 2003

This important new book by the Thernstroms, who also wrote America in Black and White, will be widely noted and much discussed in education circles in the months ahead. The authors judge the achievement gap to be not only "an American tragedy and national emergency," but also "the central civil rights issue of our time." According to NAEP data, there now exists a four-year gap between whites/Asians and blacks/Hispanics. It is already visible when children first enter school and widens as they progress through K-12 education. It is apparent even in more affluent communities, such as Shaker Heights outside of Cleveland, where black academic achievement is good - but still lags behind. These gaps depress the future earnings potential of minority students, limit their ability to matriculate to college and succeed there, contribute to high rates of social dysfunction and help to create a persistent underclass.

A number of factors are at work, including the lingering effects of racism, poor childhood nutrition and prenatal care, single parenthood, crime, etc. Ill-conceived and ineffective government programs, some of them designed to shrink the gap, are also to blame. But the primary factor holding back black and Hispanic academic achievement - and here we approach the controversial heart of this book - is what can be broadly called culture.

For the Thernstroms, culture is a set of "values, attitudes, and skills that are shaped and reshaped by environment." It encompasses a wide range of attributes, including family expectation and general attitudes toward schooling. There is rich data, both quantitative and qualitative, that lays out some of the cultural patterns that militate against minority academic success. The Thernstroms cover that data and add some observations of their own. For example, the effect of youth culture and especially television has enormous implications for academic achievement in many black families. Black children watch an average of five hours of television per school day, almost as much time as they spend in classes. When weekend viewing is added, TV time far exceeds school time. Only one-fifth of white or Asian children view that much television (with Hispanics more like whites in this respect).

Black children are also more apt to report low levels of respect for educators and to be labeled "disruptive" in class. Other measures, such as the number of books in a home, or the quantity of verbal interaction per day between adults and pre-school children, put them at further disadvantage. Low birth weight, poor nutrition, and other social factors contribute. These factors tend to feed on themselves: once they are seen as underperforming in school, minority youngsters are shunted into less demanding classes and are more likely to drop out entirely - exacerbating the achievement gap.

The good news is that none of these factors is immune to fixes. In fact, studies show that once certain factors are removed, the achievement gap shrinks. Cultural traits that contribute to academic success can be transferred. The book's profiles of KIPP and other successful schools - schools that, week in and week out, demonstrate that these gaps can be narrowed - are worth the purchase price. So is the chapter on "roadblocks to change." But there's much more between these covers. The ISBN is 0743204468 and for more information, go to http://www.simonsays.com/index.html and search for "No Excuses."

Elizabeth McPike et al., Albert Shanker Institute
September 2003

The Albert Shanker Institute is the source of this astute and forceful manifesto on how and why to prepare young Americans (and others) to be effective, committed citizens of a democracy. It updates the 1987 "Education for Democracy: A Statement of Principles," which was jointly developed by the American Federation of Teachers, Freedom House, and our own organizational ancestor, the Educational Excellence Network. Lots of prominent folks have signed the new manifesto, which effectively decimates moral relativism and feel-good history and calls for a strong, democracy-centered curriculum in history, civics, and other key fields. Educators, we hope, will have difficulty ignoring it. And we welcome the kinship between this eloquent statement - characteristic of the Shanker Institute's work in this field and the AFT's long record of good sense in matters curricular - and our own recent efforts to reclaim the social studies. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/template/page.cfm?id=252.) You can find the report at http://www.shankerinstitute.org/Downloads/EfD-draft.pdf.

John R. Logan, Deirdre Oakley and Jacob Stowell, Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Harvard University
September 1, 2003

This short, uninspired, and wholly predictable paper presents a variety of data on the demographics of Boston and its surrounding suburbs, all of which show that Boston is segregated: blacks live in the city and whites live in the suburbs. As a result, Boston-area public schools are segregated and (the paper presumes) are much worse in the city than in the suburbs. Of course, Boston mirrors many other metropolitan areas in this respect, though its segregation is sharper than most. This is a familiar problem and one with no easy solutions (as the tragic history of Boston busing and backlash readily attests). However, the complexity of the issue is no excuse for this paper's embarrassingly weak "conclusions and policy implications," which simply restate the problem and suggest that "the only way that desegregation plans could substantially reduce the separate and unequal character of public education is if they were applied region-wide." This has long been the single note sung by the Harvard Civil Rights Project but it starts and ends with the false premise that state-controlled desegregation plans are the solution. A better idea is to make district boundaries permeable and allow families to choose among all public schools. Minnesota tried this and found that, in the worst districts, housing prices rose (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=14#298); in other words, choice helps decrease the economic disparities that contribute to segregation in the first place. More importantly, it would give minority students the same option to "escape the City of Boston" that this paper says whites have already exercised. To read for yourself, see http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressreleases.php/record_id=37/.

Lance D. Fusarelli, Palgrave Macmillan Inc. 2003

The author is a young professor of education policy at Fordham University (no connection). Though this short, heavily footnoted book reads like a doctoral dissertation, it's a useful review of the politics of school choice (both vouchers and charters), viewed through multiple lenses and with no particularly axe to grind. His conclusion: "If we are witnessing a revolution, it is a slow-moving, uneven revolution whose outcome is very much in doubt." The ISBN is 140396047X. If interested, you can learn more by surfing to http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalogue/index.asp?isbn=0312237537.